


Fortune Favors the Bold

by rednightmare



Category: Kingdom Come: Deliverance (Video Game)
Genre: (Actually) Period-Typical Prejudice, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst with a Happy Ending, Attachment Anxiety, Comedy of Errors, Consensual Sex, Courtly Love, Drunk Sex, Emotional Rollercoaster, Established Relationship, Extremely Unsanctioned Use of Church Property, F/M, Feudal Classism, Forbidden Love, Jealousy, Letters, Loneliness, Love Confessions, M/M, Medieval Joust, Oral Sex, POV Multiple, Penetrative Sex, Pining, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romantic Comedy, Romantic Friendship, Separations, Sex Work, Sports? Sports, Threesome - F/M/M, blunt force trauma, idiots to lovers, whump lite
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:01:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 35,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23350606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rednightmare/pseuds/rednightmare
Summary: Whatever I say, whatever I sing,Whatever I do, that heart shall seeThat I shall serve with heart lovingThat loving heart that loveth me- Unknown Poet, c. 1500AnAmorous Adventures+Capon’s ChampionDLC redux romp staged during a joust and narrated via three alternating POVs: Lord Capon, Henry, and Karolina. Silly and sad in turns. (Mostly silly, though.)
Relationships: Hans Capon/Henry, Hans Capon/Henry/Karolina, Mistress Zora/?
Comments: 10
Kudos: 19





	1. Act One: Among Friends

**Author's Note:**

> **HISTORICAL FICTION DISCLAIMER:** Like the video game it's derived from, FORTUNE is not a work of nonfiction. I've attempted to extend Warhorse's lifelike and believable medieval world, but do be aware that historical details have been altered and/or presumed where hard facts are unavailable, inconsistent with KCD's characterization/narrative, or simply not conducive to good storytelling. Please do not use it as learning material or as a reference text.
> 
>  **CONTENT WARNINGS: This piece contains semi-spoilers for _Amorous Adventures_ , but key details have been changed.** Chapters will vary dramatically in terms of work safety. I will put up an appropriate warning list in the header of each installment, but you are safe to assume sexual encounters in FORTUNE will only involve consenting adults. **Please be aware that the rating will gradually increase to E.**
> 
>  **READING ORDER** : Though FORTUNE is tonally quite different from my other KCD works, it was written to fit the characterization and general timeline of its predecessors, [LOST IN THE TREES](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18524197) and [BELOW THE STORM](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1133063). It can be read free-standing. 
> 
> **HISTORICAL TIDBIT** (more like ESSAY): Bear with me, but a multi-parter featuring public vs. secret relationships and the artifice of courtship calls for an [extended note on medieval European sexuality](https://rednightmare18.dreamwidth.org/417.html). If you’re already familiar with this topic or if you’re not super fussed about historical fidelity in your FREAKING FANFICTION, you’re fine to go ahead and skip this. It is not required reading and there will not be a quiz at the end of the unit. :P

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **CHAPTER WARNINGS** : T. Overt sexual references.

╭╼|══════════|╾╮

_Love is a kind of war. Slackers, dismiss!_   
_There are no cowards guarding this standard._   
_Night and winter, long roads and cruel sorrows,_   
_And every kind of labour is found on love’s campaigns._

— OVID, The Art of Love

  
“Audentes Fortuna iuvat!”

— HANS CAPON, quoting the Latin proverb as it appears in the Aeneid: _Fortune favors the bold._

╰╼|══════════|╾╯

God save him: Henry was learning how to write.

_From Henry, born of Skalitz_ _  
__to my good frend and naybor_ _  
__Goodwife Antonia, servant of Pirkstein Castle pleas give this letter_ _  
__for delivry to Lord Hans Capon of Rattay at his pleasure_

_DEAR MY LORD_

_I bet you thought I was jokeing about sending letters. Well, I suppose you got that dead rong._

_For your edifictation, I send letters quite often. It is aparte of my soldiering responsibility to report the goings on in the countryside. Lest you get it into your head that you are_ ~~ _eskep_ ~~_~~axsepsh~~ ~~xepshona~~_ _speshal or somthing, you can ask Sir Radzig about it, and he will tell you I send him letters all the time._

_This time I am writing in Sir Radzig’s camp by Mehojed so I don’t have any nede to send reports. I would be talking with him this very moment, I imagine, were his lordship not already abed. Alas, I am sitting here on this turnip barrel with an old candle writing instead to you. I could go eat with the soldiers, I suppose, but I don’t much like people looking down over me while I am trying to write. So you will just have to forgive the mess, firstly because writing on your nese is a challenge, secondly because I might slip off this thing from time to time._

_Also if my writing seems sloppy it’s because I have been_ ~~_inn vaestigate_~~ _looking around the farmsteds here and there and all over the damned hills on account of those snype silver banditts Master Feyfar sent me hoofing after. In fact I have only just got here, tired to bits, to find out the army is about to bundle up and move back to the Talmberg hill camp. (Though not me, of course, since I’ve got to run more arrands for his lordship.)_

_I’m sure it’s for the best, anyway, if only so Sir Radzig’s men can keep a proper patrol on that north road. God’s truth it is still a DISASTUR in Pribyslavitz. Runs my blood cold just to think of all that dragging brigynds and rapists out of honeysuckle and slitting their throats. Not to sound ungraetful to you or Sir Hanush, because I do appreciate my little bailey room when I actually have cause to sleep in it, but you don’t hand out prizes for that. If you want to kommend me for my bravry, then pleas get somone up here to burn back all those damn sticker bushes and hogweeds before it gets banditts again and we have to saddle up and do everything over. Because I can’t stomach it. I tell you, I can’t._

_You ought to just knock that viney old place all to the ground, if you want my opinyon. I don’t know what Sir Hanush and Sir Divish are cooking up about it, and I imagine I won’t ever know, but there’s no way in hell a good lord would send people up there to live any time soon. I’ll tell you more when I get back, because it’s not the kind of thing you write in a decent letter, not even to you._

_But to be frank I am not too broken up by the move to Talmberg, that is to say I am not too upsett, because Sir Radzig has been acting a mite strange around me lately. That is to say the man is a toutche pissy, if you will forgive my_ ~~ _awdaw_~~ ~~_odd as it_~~ _cheek. It’s always: GET TO THE POINT HENRY. HAVEN’T YOU DONE WHAT I ASKED YET HENRY. HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO HUNT DOWN A HANDFULL OF BANDITTS HENRY. WILL YOU STOP THAT YAMMERING FOR TEN SECONDS HENRY. Probably he is not as used to sleeping on dirt and sticks and earthwyrms as you are, my lord._

_Anyway, that’s all I have to report to Rattay, I suppose. I thought you would be happy to have your tower to yourself for a few more wekes, at laest. I’ll tell Sir Radzig how much you miss his learnéd opinyons on your hunting and drinking and whatever else it is you put in your mouth._

_x Henry_

No one said, of course, that he could write very well.

* * *

It’s not all letters, naturally. There are other things for a terrible lord to do.

Spring thickens too early this year—it turns the world gold and gummy like sugar in egg yolk. As an unseasonable heat wave drags Rattay into sweaty laggardry, boiling Bernard’s soldiers out of their drills before noon and knocking Uncle into a deadman’s sleep every day at two o’clock, Hans is happy as a little red lovebird. Day court is empty and the stinking priest hides away in his presbytery. No one hounds him to accomplish anything. His city simmers on the rocky hill.

It is too hellish to work—and so Lord Capon finds himself blessed with an overabundance of time.

He melts around town doing nothing for hours as the butchery house reeks of sour pork and the bakers dash outside to dip their whole arms into trough water. He pokes his nose into the dark bailey church and hails Mary just to cool his dreadfully hot blood down. He plays dice games alone under the deserted shade of a tavern awning, eats greasy chicken, and thanks the suffering barmaid for bringing him disgustingly warm beer.

 _At your pleasure, milord,_ she says again and again, curtseying each time. But when she turns about in the sooty cookyard to fetch another pitcher—no patrons here but the little black paper wasps and him, of course—he can see teeth grit inside the goodwife’s jaw.

He throws his rude dice _clack_ across the wooden table and looks for any pairs.

He rolls

_a six,  
_ _a four,  
_ _a three…_

_Your drink, sir,_ the maid says, pours quickly, and walks away because she can’t stand the sight of him.

No one is pleased to be bothered by their young governor on a God-forsaken scorcher like this. They wish he would let them alone—that he would stay locked up in his castle and make a gaggle of blue-blooded, red-blond children like a proper heir of Leipa, all of them called _Birdie_ , each one skinnier and more horrible than the one before. It would be less uncomfortable if he’d eat in private and bring his whores home like a good lord. They’d greatly prefer it if he’d emerge only to deliver a law or die for their king in a field. But he cannot be asked to leave and cannot be asked to pay, so she renews his cup sloppily, annoyed, fanning her peeling pink breast.

He knows what she thinks well enough, though. They think:

_Doesn’t he have any work to do?_

_Not today,_ hums young Lord Capon, just under his breath, and throws the dice again.

Sweating aside, there are always some things to be done. That’s how it is when you’re a lord, after all—even if you’re of the legally toothless variety—even if you’re a court-stunted man-child sipping hot hops and playing games all alone.

_Two threes,  
_ _two fives,  
_ _one one  
_ and no pairs to be had _._

It’s not a flattering self-portrait. But he admits what he is, which is more than can be said of some lords.

He rolls

_two-hundred,  
_ _fifty,  
_ _three-hundred and some_ and he rolls again _._

_“What is it you do all day, anyway?”_ Henry had asked him on that first hunt. They have had many hunts since. And though their prey has migrated and multiplied and wintered white and summered brown again, his answer has not really arrived.

_One-thousand two-hundred,  
_ _four-hundred,  
_ _plus fifty more,_

he dares a last roll and

_bust._

Not a single _one_ left to win his own hand.

In lieu of rolling singles, he might resign himself to a single task, at least, before he’s too drunk or too surly to care. A good lord would choose his daily labor by assessing the priorities of the people and selecting their most pressing issue. Perhaps Hans will just throw dice for it.

One: There are glass orders from Sasau to review.

Two: There is a trunk of correspondence to answer from Father’s boot-kissing loyalists leftover in Polná.

Three: Red Menelaus, barrel-gutted and angry—and whom Sir Hans has neglected in preference for his bouncy gray hunting mare—could use a good lunge in the riding arena before he forgets what a spear looks like.

Four: Hunstman Berthold is waiting for some formal indication as to how many carrier doves he ought to make ready for fall.

Five: There is an unsigned contract regarding Rattay’s lease of the Kuttenberg executioner for a spectacular beheading in September. (The local executioner is sure to be none too pleased. The robber baron currently rotting in the rathaus dungeon won’t be tickled about it, either.)

Six: Bernard has been after him for a week about his yearly armor refitting—as if he has grown in the space of twelve months; as if he were not twenty-and-four but seven or seventy-seven; as if his bones have lengthened or his lordflesh atrophied to fat.

Seven: Uncle will hang him from the elk’s head in the hall and shuck his skin if he finds out how long it’s been since Lord Capon wrote his mother.

Eight: But all that must wait, mustn’t it? Before anything, he really ought to ride to Neuhof again and offer more than passing condolences for the butchery last spring. He needs to make an annual appearance, at least—needs to survey the damages and advise on the recovery; needs to give tortured people his blessing; needs to take a widow’s hands, horse shit or not, and pontificate about her nobly dead husband. It’s what a decent governor would do.

Nine: And that is to say nothing of his ever-mounting backlog of responsibility regarding banalities and the enforcement of this month’s fines, of appointments with Hanush’s book-keepers and his own family taxmen, and what is the point, a young lord might ask, when your king is locked in a conqueror’s cupboard, leaving you stuck ad infinitum with your legs half-in and half-out of adolescence and succession like a stick in the summer mud?

_…eight, nine, ten, fifteen, twenty…_

Sisyphus, at least, pushed his little rock all on his own. The gods let him lose everything and roll downhill as he pleased.

Hans soon bores of counting snake-eyes by himself. He chucks an uneaten chicken thigh into the nettles for a gaunt yellow cat, and watches small teeth gnaw gristle from bone. Something about it kills his hunger. He neglects the cup and shakes carven dice hard in his cupped hands. There’s something quiet below the eating sounds now, beneath the starving purr of a beast desperately laying into fresh meat. It’s something inside and pernicious and it says:

_I really should be in the castle._

He does not want to humor the thing right now. He flexes his fingers and shakes the dice harder and harder until the crack and clackle drown out the cat and its meal entirely. But it’s too late now—it isn’t fierce enough distraction—his blank mind isn’t adequately pois(on)ed to push it away. Boredom creeps in and it throws wide the gates:

_I shouldn’t be sitting here. Why didn’t I meet with the fucking taxmen? I should be a whole man of—_

The cat squints up at him, orange spines bristling along its back. Its eyes are black with greed. It has Hanush’s voice and crunches the bird bones once on his plate—

_TWENTY AND FOUR. TWENTY-AND-FOUR! YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE MORE. YOU SHOULD HAVE A LICK OF SENSE, YOU CROSS-EYED DRUNK; YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN MARRIED YEARS AGO; SHOULD BE ENTITLED AND SEATED; YOU SHOULD HAVE A SON, TWO SONS, AND AS MANY DAUGHTERS AS YOU PLEASE; SHOULD NOT BE STILL AS YOU ARE; SHOULD NOT BE SITTING HERE, THROWING YOUR UNLUCKY DICE;_

_YOU SHOULD NOT BE—_

He’s had too much beer and too much sun. Hans throws another bit of chicken to prove the daydream is over, even though it’s still roiling inside him, drumming below the alcohol and assishness. Disliking its chances of eating in peace, the tom trots off with the prize.

He pulls the crimson brocade away from the apple of his throat. Just this last roll:

_A five,  
_ _a three,  
_ _a six, and_

one lowly one.

Hans wipes his mouth on his sleeve and checks to be sure Henry’s letter is still tucked-in there. He pulls it out and reads a little more—because, of course, there is more:

* * *

_DEAR MY LORD  
_ it still goes at the top of the page.

And then, under the spot he signed it the first time, scratched in different ink as though he’d remembered the next morning:

_Actually now that I think about it, there were two more things I did nede to report to you._

_One, you should make yourself a note to send more kattel to Merhojed afore winter, and much sooner than that if you can, about ayt and twenty heads. Your vassle Melichar sayd to me their hole beef hurd had the misfortune of running amok of som vagrants two or three wekes ago and they stowl just as many animals rite off the commones. Can you imagine the nerve, scoundrelles in rags stealing people’s cowes fifty steps off the green? Worse, those monsters killed poor Wainwright Strawe’s boy, too, just for raising the alarum on their kattel-snatching. They also took with them young shepes, count three._

_(It really is sad and desperate times when a man can go plucking a pet lamb from a little girl’s arms. That’s what Melichar says happened, and I see no reason you oughtn’t trust him.)_

_(I suppose he is not really your vassle in a legal and binding sense, but since Old Smil was kilt, Melichar has been doing a fine enough job. He is not very happy with Sir Radzig, I will tell you that! Somthing about the soldiers befowling cabbages or somsuch, or shitting in som wife’s lily pond; to be onest I wasn’t really listening since I was too busy being yelled at. I feele as though I spend an awful lot of time being yelled at on behalf of Sir Radzig, now that I mention it. You think he would be a little bit nicer to me, is all.)_

_That’s it for good, now. Mind you don’t slip getting out of the bath and die with your cock out afore I get back._

_x Henry_

* * *

And there is still a page more after that, somehow. But Hans doesn’t care to read it all here—not with sweat stinking up the back of his neck and the paper wasps threatening to sting him and the echo of _TWENTY AND FOUR_ clomping in the back of his brain.

Before the poor barmaid returns, Young Lord Capon pours half his coinpurse into the empty tankard and absconds with the full one, strolling through Rattay’s midmorning market as the hanging trout spoils and the asparagus wilts, grinning himself back into idiocy, whistling a tune.

On the worst part of days like this one—when the sun roasts everyone to cracklings and the roe deer don’t stir until night—he likes it best when he can slip off into the little spinney of wildwoods just below Broken Wheel Inn. There, as the heat rises and the red cows lie down and all the burghers start to properly reek, Hans hides among cool elm saplings and overgrown berry bushes. There, safe in this little almost-forest, nestled right up against the bluff’s edge, he perches himself on a fallen oak like someone’s flyaway hunting hawk and surveys the farmland flung out below. He does not worry that Uncle will find him. He sips his stolen beer and watches the pretty girls arguing up-road on their way to the river; he reads some book about handsome French knights dying stupidly in Jerusalem; he ignores his dead father’s wheat fields turning brown.

More than the other things, of course, there he waits for Henry. When, of course, Henry is here.

Other times, Hans is alone again, and a letter will have to do.

He fishes the thing from his shirt to finish it. But for some reason—with crude paper in hand and his thumb upon the ugly candle seal and Henry’s terrible handwriting pressing ink spots though the creases—Hans finds he does not quite want to reach the end.

It’s not as if he can write back. In Radzig’s service, Henry is as likely to be propped up in Merhojed as he is to have his head shoved halfway down a rabbit’s den in the middle of God-forsaken nowhere. Petting sheep or chasing charcoal burners or gossiping with seamstresses or whatever the Hell it was that pie-faced bastard did in his spare time.

He circles the candlewax, thinks about saving it for after supper. Maybe he’ll drink a little wine and misplace it for a while. For a week, perhaps—until he tires of looking or it turns up stuck to the underside of a drawer. Until he’s got something better to do. Until the chambermaid will bring him another.

If, of course, Henry remembers to write.

Impatience gets the better of him, and he breaks it back open, anyway. One last page—he skips down to his place in line:

* * *

_DEAR MY LORD  
_ still right there at the start.

_One more thyng. My frend Matthias from Skalitz is also here in Merhojed and complains of funny tasteing water. But Matthias complains about everything so I wouldn’t take it too seriously if I was you. My pa used to say that the squeaky whyl gets the oil first, but my ma sayd back to him that the squeaky rooster gets his head lobbed off first, too. I don’t know what they say about squeaky capons. (But if I had to guess, I’d wager it isn’t anything good.)_

_Speaking of my pa, when I was nothing but a foolish smith’s apprentice—that is to say, before I met you—the old man used to tell me: TALK WITH YOUR MOUTH, LAD, NOT YOUR FISTS. (Sadly I was not a very good blacksmyth, in fact I have to tell you that until recentley I was a bit of a village yob, that is to say I was a half-brained lout. But hanging around a whole-brained lout like you makes me look a lot better by raw comparison.)_

_Nevertheless I have tried to take my father’s advice to hart, my lord, because I truly do believe he was the wisest man you ever were likely to meet. Which is why I’ve only punched you once or twice. Unfortunaetly, it takes a much longer time to ~~inn~~ ~~envisteg~~ ~~IN VAEST EGG~~ ~~god bless it~~ track down banditts when you’re trying not to hit any of them in their stinking maw. _

_Oh, and the second thing I meant to write before, can you pleas tell Captain Bernard I have got that spur he asked after. It’s a very long and dull storey so I am not even going to get into it here. (I would tell him myself, mind you, but I’m afraid he wouldn’t very much like getting letters from me and would ~~juj~~ ~~judgye~~ ~~gyudje~~ laff at my spelling besides.)_

_Oh, and one more thing before I forget all about it: Can you also let the captain know there’s another banditt gang nested somewhere in those craggy hills just below Vranik Woods, right across the river where all the white stone has washed clean? I didn’t find the camp on account of charcoal burners being bad at directions but I did manage to upset their scout quite a lot by poking around for clues up there. And then by regular poking with a sword._

_But it’s not gentlemanly to go poking around the woods with swords so I suggest you just have a soldier go ask a fisherman about it._

_To get back to my origynale point, I will be heading back to ~~Noyayhoff~~ the studfarm in two wekes, so I don’t reckon I shall be away from Rattay for too much longer. _

_I suppose that is what I have to say for the moment. I hope my letter finds you well, assuming you arn’t too drunk to read it._

_~~x Henry~~ _

_And anoether thing, that book you lent me is all rong. I will ficks it if I have time (whish I probably won’t) but you should know it is garbaeg and not worth the ink they used to jot it down. WICKED BLACKSMITHS—well, to that I say if you are going to tell people storeys about the wickedness of an onest trade or somsuch nonsense, you at least ought to have a small idea of what your on about. Maybe preests should not write about blaksmithing._

_~~x Henry~~ _

_Oh, and be sure to thank Antonia for delivering my letter. Maybe you could give her a little somthing as well, seeing as how her husband is ill._

_x Henry_

* * *

He sets Henry’s letter beside him, drains the last of his drink, and thinks about running off to shoot an animal. Perhaps once he’s killed something and eaten it, he’ll feel a little more ready to be quite so by himself again.

When Henry was here, at the first midday gong of the tower bell—as the suffering guards start stripping their waffenrocks before they can make it halfway home—Lord Capon’s somewhat-secret lad would come plodding downfield into Lord Capon’s somewhat-secret glade. He’d skid messily down the steep dirt path, kicking up acorn tops and dust, wobbly-legged from whatever Captain Bernard had made them do that day. Hal would sprawl dramatically on flattened grass and profess he was _far_ too tired for horseback lessons or fist-fighting or shooting games or anything like that. So, instead of bolting into the forest to hunt, they’d sit gabbling there like a pair of fainéants hiding from their overseer. They’d frustrate the plans of young lovers who skirted off into the bushes for sex. They’d share roasted quail or gingerbread or veal tarts—or some other half-meal a peasant had no business eating that Hans had snatched from Uncle’s kitchen before it was all the way cooked.

And there, amongst their gnawed-clean partridge bones and the wild raspberries, a bad young lord would endeavor to teach his good friend something new about the world.

He’d say _and this is how you write it in Latin._

He’d make Henry read him an old book aloud and crow _no, no, no, you cabbage—that’s not how you pronounce it, at all—listen to me—!_

He’d hold a royal chalice improvised from a soup bowl high over his head, tilt it with the ceremony of a Spaniard, and say _and this is how the dukes drink their cups in Luxembourg—!_

He’d choke _and this is how you nicely hello at a Bavarian knight: LECK MICH AM ARSCH_ _, DEUTSCHER_ —

He’d roll out a map of the whole Empire and point. _See there, blockhead, that’s where you and I are. And there’s Prague, and the Elbe. That’s Vienna, where they’ve got our cuckold king tied to a fence post. And Coventry, where the brute earl made poor Lady Godiva ride through the city streets naked as a jay. There’s the Templars’ last fortress at Ruad, too—at least it was until the Mamluks beat their sorry arses back across the sea. And there’s France, and Avignon where the one Pope pisses on the other, and there’s Paris where the English rat-knights and the Louvre coxcombs keep chopping off each other’s cocks…_

_There’s Carthage, there’s Jericho, there’s mountains and the great green Baltic Sea._

**II.**

The next letter comes square in the last half of morning. The Court of Rattay sits in the young lord’s castle under a new sun and pours wild honey on a pheasant just to tear it apart.

Lord Capon, of course, has been awake for hours. Bold as a singing blue lark, he pushes his plate of baked apples and braised fowl aside, and bids the chambermaid waltz right into the middle of a nobleman’s breakfast with her letter. He sends her scurrying off with a shiny coin and a flick of his wrist. He pops the seal in front of everyone—in front of Uncle and Feyfar and Bernard and Father’s decrepit excuse for a chaplain. And, since Radzig isn’t around to snoop overshoulder while plucking sullenly at his pottage, there’s nothing to fear.

“What business, little bird? I assume it’s urgent,” Uncle gruffs around a mouthful of custard pie. Hanush, of course, cannot read.

“No. It’s from Mother, in fact,” Hans lies. The young lord hasn’t written his mother in two years plus a handful of change, and the feeling must be mutual. She sent him a fine warm cloak on his nineteenth birthday, black tiretaine embroidered with a little golden kingfisher, and that was her encore number. Hans never wore the thing. He tucked Mother’s gift away into his wardrobe and doesn’t think of it—but, once in a great while, pulls out the dark fabric to trace its wing stitches. “She makes a point to ask after your health, of course.”

“Oh,” Uncle says. “Good,” he says. “Give Hedvika my best,” he says, “and don’t drag your damned feet on it.”

Hans sits pretty right next to Hanush and devours Henry’s writing between a dish of almond cake and roast piglet.

* * *

_From Henry, born of Skalitz  
_ _to Goodwife Antonia in Castle Pirkstein pleas give my letter  
_ _that she may give it to Lord Hans Capon of Rattay at his pleasure_

_DEAR MY LORD,_

_I apologize in advance for the next page. I dropped half a boiled egg on it and I don’t have any more paper._

_So much for the Merhojed camp! The villagers muttered two or three words about sickness, and Sir Radzig had it all torn down in a shake of a horse’s tail. Of course I got roped into packing tents, too, due to not looking busy enough. (I may also have overslept somwhat.)_

_Anyway, it’s done up and done in, so I suppose you don’t have to worry about a cabbage revolt in your territories. Do send those kattel I asked after, though. I know you’ll forget if I don’t dog you about it just a little bit. If Sir Hanush kicks and screams, tell him Melichar needs more animals for the sake of Rattay’s next goods shipment. Maybe on account of bad cheese. That’ll change his tune. Nobody wants to eat bad cheese._

_Sir Radzig’s latest migration to the Talmberg camp does turn me out into the weeds again—hence the mistake with the egg, seeing as I’m only partway through my dinner, but it’s well after nightfall and if I wait any longer to write I’ll fall asleep on this table and drool up the parchment. I’m bedding at the Inn in the Glade, which is somwhere on the Rattay road but God knows just what part of it; I’ve got no damned idea where I’m at._

_The ham-and-egg soup is only all right, by the way. I cannot rekommende it._

_There’s a real reason for my writing you, and that’s not it. Two nights ago, I had the mysfortune of running smack into one of your patrolmen (Ruda is his name) out scouting the hinter west of ~~Naey~~ ~~Noie~~ ~~Nuhofe~~ ~~how in the Devil~~ the studfarm. I say “mysfortune” because Ruda does not care for me and frankly, the feeling is mutual. R-U-D-E is right, seeing as I haven’t said a single bad word to him and, cross my hart, have got no notion where on earth he dug up his objektion to my presence. If it’s me being a village blacksmyth that’s got such a knobby stick piked up his arse, then he better get a hold of som lantern oil and wiggle it out, because what say do I have over that, I ask you. We can’t all be burghers’ sons and insufferable prats about it. And don’t start in telling me I’m imagining things, because it’s been this way since I joined your garrison and I don’t wager our future will improve any time soon. You know he actually sayd DO I HAVE TO when Captain Bernard sent him on rounds with me? I recognize he’s in your personal escort from time to time, so I hate to ~~dispaira~~ ~~desporridge~~ say nasty things about him but I don’t care, it’s just how I feel. I don’t think I have ever met somone so fucking rude who wasn’t trying to jam a spear in me. That’s saying somthing because you’ll recall when I met you, you first thing called me a yokel and spanked me with a sword._

_Now I’ve gotten all worked up and distracted from my point, which doesn’t make me like him any better._

_Anyhow, after pretending he didn’t see me for the longest time, the bastard finally stopped so I could tell him what I told you about the Merhojed move and ask after the stableboy I had sent back to ~~Noyh~~ ~~FUCK~~ the studfarm som wekes ago, just to see how he was settling in. And Ruda sayd that Ginger (that’s the stableboy) sayd that Mistress Zora sayd that Captain Robard of Talmberg sent a runner to warn her flat-out not to train on the river path because—YOU GUESSED IT—banditts. No one’s spotted them yet, but apparently a big band plodded through the dell above your hare-hunting camp and broke a hazel coppice all to bits, scared the living daylight out of the game warden up there. In fact, I wonder if they weren’t part of the group I wrote about in my last letter. So you’d best keep your boots out of those bunny runs until sombody mounts a party and drives them off. Probably you’ve already got word, but I don’t trust Ruda to remember the whole thing._

_I had somthing else to tell you, but I had to stop writing to drink the last of my soup and I’ve gone and forgotten. I’m going to leave off to eat a honey biscuit and see if I remember._

_I remembered. Can you pleas let Captain Bernard know that Ruda also sayd Guardsman Mojmir is abed with a broken arym. That stupid sop drank too much, went for a night piss and took a spill into the smallcreek with his hose down and everything. The studfarm girls are caring for his injurie, but he’s good as useless like that in a fight so I rekommende you send another soldier or two. You might not want to mention to Bernard exactly how the poor fellow busted his limb, though. I like Mojmir but he has got to ease up on the cider._

_This is why I’m always laying into you about your drinking! You’ll run off into those pines one day sodding stupid and bowl into a pit of snakes. And who would even know where to look for your flailing legs sticking up out of the crater? Lie there for a weke. You had better just hope it’s me who drags your messy arse out, too._

_As for your rotten book on BLAKSMITHS, I’m not done with it yet so don’t even ask._

_There’s more I can say, but I’m too tired to write anymore, so it’ll have to wait. I’m going upstairs to sleepe. Hope you don’t dream about falling into a writhing snake hole and having hairy spiders krawl all over your balls._

_Once more because I know you don’t mind me one fucking bit: DO NOT GO TO THE HARE CAMP._

_x Henry_

* * *

“Your mother must be doing awfully well,” Hanush observes, and Hans realizes he’s been sitting there three inches from his uncle’s elbow, smiling like a tom with a whole parakeet in his mouth. 

Who knew? Apparently your friends are still your friends even when they’re not in front of you; even when you cannot buy them things; even when you cannot force them to be.

“Oh, she is. She’s dyed her hair and had the entire estate painted over. It’s all roses and blush now. She’s thinking of taking a young suitor. Who can say! Maybe a somber little brother will come along and save all these poor burghers from me yet.”

Uncle stink-eyes him, suspicious Hans has turned him into the butt of a joke. But the old black bear’s not truly interested in digging up worms in his nephew’s stories today—Hanush and Hedvika have despised each other openly since Jan Ješek dropped cold as a dead cod between them.

“Well,” Uncle says, takes another overlarge bite of breadcrust, and leaves it at that. “I’m glad to see you’re getting along, at least.”

When Hal’s first letters came, one-by-one from across the countryside, Hans was buck-reckless. It didn’t matter wherever he was. Sprawled in his bedchamber and halfway-to-drunk; stuck in Father’s study between a stack of missives and a tall cup of hot wine; interrupted at the archery range; hurling stones over the rampart in Grandmother’s garden; square in the middle of a bath—all’s the same when your master can’t tell a _p_ from a _q_. He’d break their candlewax seals with the sniggering defiance of overeducation.

And, just in case Uncle should be tempted to enlist literacy help, the young lord of Pirkstein had long ago made it clearly understood that— _if_ Radzig knew what was good for him—then the Holy King’s hetman would shuffle back up that tower and keep his pointy nose out of it.

“Beg pardon, my lords, but I am obliged by His Holiness to honor our late Lord Ješek _._ That Lady Hedvika persists in living—well, ‘tis a blessing, to be certain, but if you’ll forgive me, is hardly considerate of her husband. Surely it bodes ill to speak of such things in poor Sir Jan’s home.” Father Milosh—who was such a sycophant for the old lord’s crumbly corpse that he managed to unite everyone around him, if only so they might detest the insufferable shaveling together—makes a show of studying his cup of chicory water. Hanush throws a glare into the side of his head while giving a walnut a very particular _crunch_. “If it pleases you, I shall say an extra prayer for her, Sir Hans.”

Sir Hans—whose long face and utterly unrepentant existence Father Milosh found nearly as objectionable as his mother’s gall not to drop dead—is unruffled. After all, nothing made the stuffed priest madder than having to look at young Lord Capon’s wicked and innocuous smile. “Oh, please do, Father. Someone ought to pray for the poor woman.”

“Then I shall say two for her, my lord, and three for you.”

“Maybe you could make it four? I’ve been lying like a whore’s whole son lately.”

“Shut your mouth before I muzzle it, Capon,” Uncle snaps, though he’s not yet awake enough to be properly steamed—and being left in peace to enjoy his letter is what just Hans wanted in the first place, anyway.

“You’re right! I apologize, good masters. And to you, Father, especially, for shocking you with my language.”

“Rest assured: I shall say the prayers anyway, my lord.”

“Then stop bitching at your betters and start that praying, priest,” Hanush bear-growls, dropping another rib bone on the plate, and it’s a marvel there are no actual claws growing betwixt his fat fingers. Milosh’s eyelids flutter nervously as his tonsure bows toward his lap. Hans always finds he still likes his uncle, no matter how much he must hide from him.

He’s not the only one in this room who can read, of course. Milosh might spoil everything if Uncle snatched Henry’s letter away and ordered him to dictate it. But Hanush _loathed_ his cousin’s chaplain even more than he disliked his surviving wife, and fancied asking him no favors. Dotty Feyfar is too busy thinking about waterwheels and silver carts to spy. And dear Bernard wouldn’t dream of it.

“I’ll send Mother your love,” Hans promises, grin hurting his dimples, imaginary prettybird feathers jutting all catawampus out between his cannibal teeth.

Feyfar yammers mathematics at the chastised priest. Uncle returns to tearing and crunching. Bernard—who knows Hans best—makes a bit of a disappointed face.

He folds Henry’s letter up, tucks it away, and finishes his cake unhurriedly, overchewing red apples to keep his smile at bay.

_It’s not that I don’t like the lad,_ Uncle had said. He’d said it once at supper a long time ago, and then another time, and then two more, and Hans gleefully forgot each one until he could no longer remember anything but a miasma of disapproval rumbling in the distance like a stormcloud that will miss. Then summer simmered into fall and fall gasped into winter and winter shuddered to fresh-faced spring—and the lad was still underfoot—and so Hanush started up saying it again, in so many tones and with so many logics, none of which Hans listened-to.

 _Henry’s a fine boy,_ Hanush said. _A fine one._ _It’s just that a blacksmith is not appropriate company for a young lord awaiting his titles._ _It’s not chivalrous to dress up a peasant and strut around town like a flock of fucking popinjays, and it’s hardly fair to poor Henry. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to stop pretending a donkey is a horse. Even you can see that,_ he said. _Even you can’t up and ignore your status forever,_ he said. He said _surely you’ve got enough sense in your head to understand this is not how it’s done._

Uncle said

 _that boy looks like a farmer_.

Hans dressed him in good leather and brocade, in silver buttons and golden spurs, until his former neighbors shot him eyes because their old blacksmith’s boy did not look much like poverty anymore.

Uncle said

 _that boy talks like a villager_.

Hans taught him to dip his quill without spilling and how to say _ad astra per aspera._

Uncle said

_this can not stand!_

Hans hid Henry in closets and under benches and in between the rose bushes; he pushed his dresser in front of his door; he swore it would be humiliation and hellfire if Hanush tried to take this one thing he had away.

And Uncle would sigh over his mulberry gin and turn to the fireplace and rub his great bearded muzzle like a builder watching a house burn down.

He said

_don’t say I didn’t warn you._

Some days, Henry would be too worn-out from a bout in Captain Bernard’s swordfighting ring to read or write anything. He’d drink a half pint of cyser and knock out on the grass, leaving Hans there to twiddle his thumbs and pluck field stickers from Hal’s gambeson and wave the horseflies off him until he couldn’t stand it anymore and booted the blacksmith awake.

On those days, then, they would forsake the extra lessons. When the mosquitoes were full of piss and vinegar—or after a night of zealous drinking had left them too groggy to go tramping down into the raspberry bushes entirely—they’d stumble away from Pirkstein courtyard and walk uptown to the alley tavern, where Hans would buy Henry a late breakfast, and they’d sit in each other’s company with dark eyes and ragged looks.

Uncle, of course, could be counted upon. The cantankerous old bear would’ve come thundering downhill and chewed Father’s sword into scrap were he to catch Lord Capon breaking fast with a peasant in the plain view, there among the afternoon drinkers and the dice gamblers and the petty towner hoi polloi. But what did it matter, really? What business have distant cousins in bothering a sole heir with constant grousing and intangible warnings? What business, at that, had any of these people to do with _opinions_ on Sir Hans or the company he kept—braying and honking to court as they do, begging for their dead master’s son to slap a surly neighbor with the paddle of manorial law? He had done a good sight worse than tear bread with a blacksmith, after all. He had just so many sins.

He’d call the barmaid to bring them a platter of hard cheese and a pitcher of cool ale and say _give me a break, lad. What else would I be doing this second if not listening to you butcher Latin and prattle about your mill girl? I’d be swilling my way into a stupor—you know that’s the truth, too._

He’d say _what do I care about taking luncheon at Court? You know who’s in my venerable court? Uncle! Radzig! An unbearable priest and a dizzy old engineer! This is fucking Rattay, you melon-head, not the High Byzantines of Palermo; I’m a God-damned horse-and-cart lord. Let Radzig and Uncle entertain themselves. You’re the only person worth talking to in this bloodless fucking city, anyway._

He’d say _and there’s nothing in the whole world Hanush could do to me that would make me take one word of it back._

He’d fold his arms on the table and lay his wine-woolly head down and listen with one eye closed as Hal, babying a headache of his own, polished off a bowl of drumsticks and nattered on and on and on and on about the arse-end of nothing. When he wasn’t made to read, Henry would tell Hans a hundred little things about Yulia the Glover and Benush the Gate Guard and Elishka the Executioner’s Wife (and all he reckoned a good lord should be doing about them). He’d talk you right back to sleep at ten o’clock on a Tuesday. And with his skull whittled on yesternight’s good sport and the smell of fried mutton rotting his stomach, Hans would languor there between annoyance and drunk-sickness, listening to all this nonsense. And he’d smile, a little.

He’d say _if the priests’ prattle is worth a shit, if there really is a divine design, if it’s not just cosmic anarchy, then how else can you explain all of it, Hal? The way it all happened, just-so._

He’d say _none of them know a thing. Uncle and Radzig and the rest. They say they do, but they don’t. All of those sermons and all of those rules and all of the philosophies—it’s all death, death, death! That’s the best they can come up with after a thousand fucking years. It’s not worth shit to us, Henry! What do they know about which things matter? Wine matters. Tits matter. Life matters! You know that, and who cares for the pig-prelates and the petty lords? None of those men have ever loved anything. None of them know a damned fucking thing about the world—_

He’d say _you, Hal, and me. It was always going to be this way._

And—when he was away—when there was no friend around to teach foreign profanities or listen to yabber or help find his place on a map—Hans lent Henry books.

_The Rivers of Cathay_

_Witches and Wars Across Bohemia_

_A Gentleman’s Guide to Fair Swordplay in Peaceful Combat Engagement_

_Bellum se Ipsum Alet:_ _The Strategy of Moving Armies_

_Commentaries and Wonders in the Holy Land_

_The Letters of Alexander the Great_

_Renart the Fox and Other Robber Barons_

_Bestiary of Known Creatures, Mundane and Mythic_

_The Rise and Fall of the Knights Templar_

_Book of Signets_

_L’Image du Monde: The Mirror of the World_

It’s not as though Hal was a complete idiot, precisely. It’s just that there were always plenty more things Hans thought he could stand to know—and, blacksmith or not, there is always room for an extra word between friends.

**III.**

The next letter finds Lord Capon during dueling practice. Captain Bernard must halt their battery in order to argue with the bowyer over this-and-that, so Hans climbs the arena fence for a short rest. He sits under the canopy tent and unbuckles the sweaty neck of his training jupon, looking like a skinny fucking bumblebee in black and gold quilt. He tosses gloves and sword on the picnic table, and sips a little blue wine.

_Sir Hans._

The servant startles him before he even notices she is walking his way. He slides Father’s weapon off the table and across his lap so as to be marginally less unchivalrous.

“Begging your pardon, sir. I didn’t mean to make you jump,” Antonia apologizes, curtseying as an afterthought. She’s got villagers’ manners, but tries hard to exude something brisk and burgherish—and Hans truly doesn’t care a fig for respect, anyway. “I only meant to pass on a letter for you, and Master Berthold thought you might be here.”

Her posture is as crude as her manners are; her hair looks lightened with ash and lime, but not especially well. One can easily tell she is overstrong for cleaning out nobles’ bedclothes, and she seems a bit gaunt in the face, too, as women who skip meals do. It’s odd the bailiff would appoint a refugee to castle work, but there are odder things afoot in Rattay these days, and Hans is increasingly happy to see her, for she only appears to freshen his fireplace or to bring him letters from Hal.

There’s a whole parcel today. He all but swipes it from the sweating chambermaid, etiquette forgotten in the delight of a present, stinging his bruised elbow a bit where Bernard got the better of him this morning. Father’s blade threatens to slip and thump the dry grass, but he catches war steel against his thighs with all the decorum of a mop. In bold and uneven hand, stuck on the tight bundle:

_This book, WICKED BLACKSMITHS, belongs to the library  
_ _in Pirkstein Castle of Lord Hans Capon of Rattay called Birdie and formerly of  
_ _Lord Jan Ješek also of Rattay also called Birdie  
_ _should it become separated from my parcel pleas return it there  
_ _at the graetful behest of a loyal subject of his Lordship_

“Should I just leave it with you, my lord?” she asks. There’s a letter, too, pinched between her fingers. And as he takes the message, where the name ANTONIA is scrawled there in Henry’s sloppy but deliberate hand, Hans feels a little guilty for not bothering to better notice her before.

“How is your husband,” he asks.

She blinks at him, bewildered as a sparrow. Her fists clap down to the sides of her crude day dress. “My husband, sir?”

“He is ill, isn’t he?”

Antonia stands there for a moment longer, spine stiff, older than him and not at all ravishing or heavy-hipped enough to be eyed-up by a stripling lord with clean bootheels and so much red in his hair. She clearly wonders what in the hell he’s about, asking her such a thing—for young Birdie enjoys a local reputation—and he feels badly for forgetting that, too, not that he doesn’t deserve it. He wants to tell her that’s not what he’s after—that skirt and tail and the chase-and-eating of pretty things are not the whole of who he is—but he doesn’t even know the poor woman, not really, and he can’t say any of it, not really—and in the more honest hidey-holes of his head, he knows there is a living version of him that would have meant it _exactly_ that way.

“He is, sir,” Antonia agrees, bonier than she was a moment ago. A ghost of something wan and condemning passes behind her black stare. “He’s been sickly for a year and then-some, ever since his injury. A horse fell on him in Skalitz. Crushed the whole side of him from here to there, and pushed a rib through just under his arm.”

“Jesus!"

“Aye. It’s a terrible thing to see happen to your husband, my lord. I will pray you never have cause to look at a man’s rib sticking up out of him.”

The old French fathers of Chivalric Code thought women scare as easily as turtle doves. They wrote their venerable rules on the presumption that owning a womb and two tits ensured you’d go shrieking away at the mere suggestion of bloodsport, that you’d kirtle over cold with one glimpse at sharp steel—in case you needed proof no chevalier has ever actually fucked a woman. But in that moment, seeing the refugee who changes his sheets stand there with the image of her husband’s rib stuck behind her eye, Hans is glad he put away the sword.

“How did he—? You’ll forgive me for asking, but Christ, how does a bean farmer survive something like that?”

“Miners, my lord. I suppose Sigismund’s people didn’t fancy poking too deep into the silver caves just like that, so I dragged him inside and wrapped him up as best I could.” She pauses to swat at a fly pestering her ear. “We snuck away after dark. The Talmbergers said all the Skalitz folk had gone on to Rattay, so here I am.”

“And how on earth is that?” Hans squawks. He does not mean to sound amused, but some things are so horrid, his voice does not know what to do, or how a lord’s words ought to rise and fall on the hot spring air. “You carried him all that way? What—on your back? Like a sack of turnips?”

“What else could I do, sir?”

“Good Lord! You must be an Amazon. I mean it as a compliment,” he assures, but his unlordly voice caws, sounding even more like a man who is laughing at you. “I think it’s remarkable. You’re a damned good wife, anyway. I don’t think I’ve had a woman who would carry me around like that, ribs or not.”

Antonia shrugs in a way that suggests she does not appreciate these compliments much. Hans pulls the book and letter onto his lap, right atop St. George’s sword, as though bad lords are made less unsightly when taking up the least amount of space.

“What’s the matter with him now?”

“He’s liquid in the chest, my lord. It comes and goes, but it’s never all the way gone. I’ve spent a fortune at the apothecary.”

“Will he live?” Hans hears himself ask. And he does not mean it cruelly, either—but his curiosity is too strong for good manners. And he cannot always remember he is a rich man. And the young lord does not realize how his interest turns his toothsome face too lively and his gray eyes too keen, until he’s less of a wily fox or a pretty birdie and more of a cat that hasn’t been fed in days, until nothing about him seems benign. Perhaps it is no wonder Hanush still thinks him so useless.

“By the grace of God, I’m led to believe he will. Thanks largely to your kindness, sir.” Gratitude sends her rude stare toward the cobbles, but it’s more obligation than obsequiousness. Hans is lucky not to have offended her again, though he hasn’t the damndest idea of what he’s being thanked for. “We’re truly grateful for all you’ve done to help us.”

“Me? What did I do,” he puzzles—which is to imply, of course, that he had done a great deal of nothing.

“For letting us live here, my lord. And for our jobs,” she answers dutifully, attempting another bow. Perhaps she thinks the young lord is fishing for some mid-morning adulation, that he takes a side of heel-kissing with his afternoon wine.

“You have Sir Hanush to thank for that. I’d wager your Sir Radzig was coming in whether I liked it or not.”

She looks shifty for a spell, like someone with a secret. “Beg pardon, Sir Hans, but I know what you did for me, too—not to make myself a nuisance. I just want you to understand that I appreciate it, and that anyone in Rattay would care what becomes of us from the silver mines.”

“And just where, exactly, did you hear about this great favor?” (Which is to say it was Sir Hans’s first time hearing about any of it, too.)

“Straight from Bailiff Borislav. He wasn’t too happy about the arrangement, my lord; I don’t think he trusts us Skalitz folk. I only wanted to haul water for Merchant Hagan, and he wasn’t even keen on giving me that. But he said that the order came from you, personally, sir. That I was to work in the castle and that they were already coming to move my husband into the servants’ quarters.” She says it all with cool unfeeling, as if the bailiff’s words have echoed through her head many times, none of them more illuminating than the last. Her steady stare, unaverted, betrays little, but Antonia absently dusts the front of her day dress as though to shake off tiny leaves. “I had assumed you’d been told of our misfortune in detail, my lord, and so I didn’t want to be a pest. But I’m sure that bailiff of yours—pardon me, sir—I’m sure Master Bailiff would never have found me waged work otherwise, let alone seen a roof over our heads.”

“Oh,” he says of it—which he had, of course, not done. “That was generous of me.”

And then he feels quite stupid for not having thought of that, or having known her name until Henry pointed it out to him, or for understanding how any of this came about. And so he tries to overpay for the message, but the dubious way she eyes the coins in his palm—as if he’ll grab her when she tries to take them—makes him feel more sheepish than he had before, which is not a feeling a lord should have to be accustomed to, but when you’re only partway a lord (and not even a good one), well, what choice do you have?

Before he can wily up a way to reassure her, she’s done her yokel’s bow, and is gone.

He unfolds the letter in his lap. As the sun batters them all and the hilly wind flutters paper edges, Hans reads:

* * *

_From Henry, born of Skalitz  
_ _to Goodwife Antonia, chamber mayd of Castle Pirkstein  
_ _please deliver this parcel in good condition, to be later convayed to  
 ~~~~__Lord Hans Capon of Rattay at his pleasure_

_DEAR MY LORD_

_Well, I have ficksed your awful book for you. It is a little bit wet since I was caught in a rainstorm partway to Ledetchko and it is also rather sooty, on account of me being presently hidden in an old mineshaft, on account of the rain. Still I think you will find my notations on the subjekt have improved the ~~cual~~ quality of the writing immensely, considering I am an ACTUAL BLAKSMITH, not a soggyheaded preste who can’t tell a horseshoe from a bucket handle. _

_And one other thing I forgot in my last letter: There’s a farmsted all covered in graepe leaves on the high river road that’s just lying there. Doesn’t anyone live in it but that old stray hound? The roof looks rotted but it’s very pretty out by those tall pines and not too far from the mill, so if nobody wants it, maybe you ought to ask if my young naybor Vincent and his ma would fancy staying there, seeing as how his pa used to be a farmer and they might have some skill at graepes-growing. (They’re a good kind for eating, which I know on account of eating a lot of them. I would bring a basket back to prove it, but that dog is mean.)_

_Speaking of houses, I wish you would talk to Sir Hanush about building a new cottage or two along the Ledetchko road. I’m sure som of the Skalitz folk should like to settel in Rattay for good, rather than bet on when Sir Radzig will get around to reclaiming the silver mines. He doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, if I may say so, and what are all those people to do if it truly storms this winter? You can’t have them skwatting around your castle begging for pretzels another year, anyway, can you._

_If you don’t know about giving a whole propertie to young Vincent, then maybe you’ll let the old Skalitz dovekeep Beran and his wife have it. I don’t know if he’s worth two groschen on a farm but they haven’t got any better place to go. And that might as well be me out there sleeping in a gutter, if not for the goodness of Sir Radzig and the charitie of Sir Hanush. I suppose you gave me some charitie here and there, as well._

_You know, I always meant to ask you what happens if the berghurs don’t have enough beggars in town to give their alms. We didn’t have but one or two beggars in Skalitz, and they were only vagrants passing through. If our neighbors fell on hard times, well, you could hardly call them beggars, even in the worst of it, because you’d always have somone offering a hay shed to sleep in or a chop of mutton to eat, on account of everyone knowing everyone. Meanwhile nobody even cares to hello at the beggars in Rattay, and you burghers have plenty! You were rotten with beggars well before we Skalitz folk showd up all charred and lice-headed at your doorstep, so don’t give me any of that “there’s no room” nonsense._

_I suppose I could understand if a lonely spinster felt nervous just handing out biscuits to any old street beggar in Prague, on account of there being so many people, nobody knows anyone. But Rattay’s a drop in the bucket next to Prague. Doesn’t that pryg of a chaplain of yours preach that alms-giving is the only way a townsman can hope to get into heaven? If you towners truly listened to him, there wouldn’t be any beggars left for long. Supposing that were ever the case, would you have one brought in from som other place? For the sake of the poor berghur souls? Does the bailiff have to assign a man to beg? Maybe the midday guard could take turns, considering all they ever seem to do is drink, anyway. Maybe they ought to have been lords._

_Forgive me for saying so, but all that business sounds like a load to me. Maybe your preste would be better off sticking to writing about WICKED BLACKSMITHS._

_Anyway, I’m quite sooty and ready to come home now, so I’ll cut this letter short. I expect to be guzzling your fancy wine and dirtying your bathwater afore the weke’s out. I’m very tired of running around and will be glad for it even if I have to put up with you._

_Take care you don’t misstep in all this rain and tumble down your front steps and break your drunken arse in front of everyone._

_x Henry_

And, below that, jotted like afterthought:

_The notes are inside, since I didn’t want to write on your father’s books, after all._

* * *

He looks at his parcel and looks at his sword, and before either Hanush or Jan Ješek can start their disembodied braying in the ethers of his head, Lord Capon stands himself up and calls over to the dusty arena.

“Bernard!”

The captain glances away from the red-faced bowyer. Seeing his master’s son standing there with a paper-wrapped book under one arm startles the anger right out of that sour voice. Hans is certain he will look like an unloved boy of ten to Bernard forever. “How now, sir? Is that arm all right?”

“It’s fine. Only a little bruise.” He gives his stricken limb a shake to prove it. The captain, God save, always sounds as though he feels sorry for him. “I’m interrupting your friendly chat just long enough to take my leave.”

“Done already, sir? I expected you’d want a turn at the shooting range afterwards. Are you sure I didn’t catch your heavy arm?”

“No, no. My arm is impervious to your damned Deutschland tendon-cutting maneuvers by now. But I am finished for the day.” It’s partway a fib—there’s a pronounced zinging in his middle finger. Rattay’s own captain has taught its young lord all he knows of combat, and so Sir Hans simply fights like a quicker and rawer version of Bernard; for all he makes up in the flames of youth, though, he loses to a seasoned old soldier every time. “If Hanush comes after me, tell him I’ve gone to review some papers. You may keep your range, Master Bowyer.”

The bowyer, for his part, stands there white-knuckling the training gate and glances everywhere else, for he grows a good deal redder whenever he is unlucky enough to happen across Sir Hans. (It may be the passion of fealty, but Sir Hans suspects it has more to do with a poor bowyer fiercely not wanting to remember the two or three times they’d fucked in the month after Old Birdie whistled his last, when Young Birdie was even younger and hotter-burning and more detestable than he is now. Far too young and too detestable for a married bowyer to have any business mucking around with, and if it’d been him, Hans supposed he’d stagger around terrified for the next five years, too. He mercifully ignores the sad sot’s blushing existence here-out.)

“As you say, sir,” Bernard relents, though sounds a little disappointed in him, as he usually is. “But I must again remind you that you’re overdue for a harness fitting.”

“Consider me reminded. I’ll go see the armorer first thing tomorrow, all right?”

The captain doesn’t quite look like he believes it, but Hans leaves anyway, sword at his hip and _WICKED BLACKSMITHS_ tucked beside his bruise.

Pirkstein is muggy, even with the window cracked. Lord Capon doesn’t light a candle, but lingers in the echoey darkness that belongs to all castles and subsists on the slanted daylight of his bedchamber. He throws his quilted jacket and his parcel on the mattress, then hangs Father’s sword on its hook above the painted fireplace. And he pulls open his great oak wardrobe, separating the carven stags dueling there, one on each dark door.

Henry’s literary skills have only been letter-worthy for a season or two, but mastery of the word doesn’t start with letters. They’d been at it a long year and some change; in that time, Hans hadn’t burnt a leaf his pupil wrote. He ought to hold the evidence of their indiscretions over a torch, but it was his student, and his friend, and so his folly, too. Instead, he keeps them here among fox mantles and riding boots and velvet scarves—in various places, of course, because fools are not necessarily idiots. He stashes Hal’s smuggled notes and off-color sketches in the folds of his Bible, where no one would look, and where no one would expect damnable young Lord Capon to spend any serious time. He secrets snickery messages they’d passed back-and-forth deep into old coat pockets. He creases their practice lessons tight and slips their awful marginalia in the underside of a drawer, under a heap of hunting gloves.

Hans doesn’t bother picking out a real hiding place. He slips this new letter into the neck of an old shoe and replaces his sweaty tunic with a fresh one. Then he bounces onto his bed with boots and all, pulls the book from its leather wrapping, and opens it up.

 _WICKED BLACKSMITHS_ smells like coal and damp dog. The cover looks the same, give or take a little wet leather and road-battery. The title engraving has even survived Hal’s wrath, and it sits there, innocuous, in his lap.

He turns the whole thing upside-down—

—and an avalanche of scrap papers rains out.

Once he’s laughed himself fully stupid and wiped his weepy eyes enough to see, his legs and his covers snowed-over by badly torn bits of scribbling, young Lord Capon takes stock of the disaster. There are too many notes to count by sight. The thought of Hal—scraping along in the middle-of-nowhere like a goddamn barbarian, hunkered over a small candle in a filthy soldier’s camp, red in the face and writing so furiously he can’t stop, then slamming each correction into the book with a pound of his fist—scrambles Hans’s brain silly. He tallies where they fall in pairs and threes like rolls of dice.

He picks a few to read at random:

_Two things here. Thing One is that if your preste knew a handfull of crumbs about BLAKSMITHING, he would know that no smith in his right mind would ever think of making keys for som rhyming criminal who wasn’t even likely to pay him. Thing Two is that no blaksmith memorizes anyone’s God damned keys! Not all of us with trades can just yank nonsensical contraptions and deseptions out of our arseholes like a rotten lying chaplayn._

_Common blaksmiths do not make bridle pieces and shoes and things. Farriers make horse bits—dosn’t every idiot know that? Maybe not if you spent half your life in a cloyster and the other half with your head shoved up a lord’s powdered arse, no offense._

_Your preste does not know the difference between a blaksmith and a loksmith. He really, actually thinks they are the same thing._

_Firstly, this isn’t how you make a knyf at all, so jot that down. If you want to make a knyf that will even be partway decent to eat with, first you have got to blunt the tip so that you don’t accidentally hammer it to shit when you’re narrowing the bolster and the whole thing collapses on you like a sad used up cock._

_It’s funny to me that a PRESTE of all people would be accusing onest tradesmen of taking groschen from robbers and thieves and other unscrupulous characters when PRESTES collect sinners’ tithes all day long. Truly I am not even angry, I am just laffing. Because it is that funny._

_BLAKSMITHS DO NOT SELL PULL’D TEETH! DO YOU THINK WE LIKE REACHING INTO YOUR NASTY ROTTING MOUTHS ALL ON ACCOUNT OF YOU LOT NOT BOTHERING TO CHEW A LITTLE HAZEL ONCE IN A FUCKING YEAR? TERRIBLE LIE_

Hans lends books to Henry so Henry will learn, of course. But sometimes—if you are a friend at all—you must do a few things just to make your best lad want to stab you in the kidney.

It isn’t just ferocious little scraps, though. Hans brushes a hillock of the blizzard aside and comes up with some color—smeared green fibers, wilted browns. He digs until tiny yellow petals lead him to a slump of gold.

A marigold, that is.

Just one.

It’s not unusual to find Henry fussing at flowers. You could often spot the boy picking forget-me-nots off Pirkstein’s moatside, looking silly and bright in his new Rattay garrison gold, collecting whole bouquets just to tote around aimlessly. Or perhaps you’d see him on his way home from Captain Bernard’s training yard with a long field daisy pinched thoughtlessly between his fingers. He bounced fistfuls of bluebells up and down city hill with him as though he didn’t have anything particular in mind for the things but to hold them until they died. Some likely found their way to his millmaid, but Hans watched plenty more simply deteriorate in his hand over the course of a day. Hal never seemed entirely aware he was doing it, and really ought to be made fun of for such a girlish hobby. Alas, even young Birdie can’t dredge up the spleen to go after their poor old used-to-be-a-blacksmith’s boy for carrying his wildflowers around.

He must have tried to press this one and forgotten about it. Hans dandles the marigold in his palm, all slouchy and nowhere near dry enough to save. When he opens his father’s book, there’s its signature: a musky orange silhouette in the center of a page.

He might as well toss the flower—it surely won’t survive. But something keeps him from it, and so he slips Hal’s botched marigold into his belt pocket, feeling strange, as though some part of him does not want anyone else to see.

Sir Hans is not what one might call knowledgeable in friendship. Lest you mistake that for bellyaching, he _is_ highly skilled in being alone; rest assured, the young lord has been on his own since long before Mother skirted home and Father kicked the bucket; and furthermore, he would much rather be on his lonesome chasing bunnies in a glen than lodged in court being nagged into old age or, worse, surrounded by false companions clambering to lick the horseshit off his lordly bootheel. It is marginally more uncomfortable without the company of dogs, but perhaps you don’t need a dog as badly when you have a friend. Out there, somewhere. Doing whatever it is he does.

_“I don’t know why you’d enlist a grubby blacksmith after he plods into this castle and embarrasses you like that, Radzig,”_ Hanush had said over lunch one million years ago, before Hans even knew to think about Henry at all—before he knew Hal’s name or had memorized the anatomy of his nose, the nervous grinding of his rearmost teeth, before he could tell which eyelash on a napkin was his.

 _“I confess I don’t truly have a good reason,”_ Radzig had answered. _“But I liked the father, and so perhaps I’ll find myself well-disposed enough to like the son, too.”_

To Hell with Radzig. Hans liked him a lot. An absurd amount. He was just mad about him, in fact, and in fact, he felt as close to the grubby blacksmith as to anyone, anywhere.

And if he dwelled on it too long—long enough to churn the desperate dandy into a stormy drunk—Hans could close his eyes, press a wine glass against his temple, and hear his own voice crack exactly as it has last month, that morning he’d galloped down to the bailey room and discovered Hanush had sent Henry haring off to Radzig without time enough to say goodbye. The empty bed had gutted him so unexpectedly that he could not even wonder _why_ or _where_ or when Hal would come back. The suddenness of being alone again struck him wet-eyed and stupid. He’d felt like a salmon with a knife in his liver. He’d stormed into Uncle’s bedchamber and thrown a rank fit before Hanush had so much as laced up his collar. He’d meant to sound lordly. He had sounded like a child about to hurl down his toy soldiers and cry:

_It’s not asking for the riches of Al-Basra to want to be allowed a friend!_

And he could still hear Hanush, too:

_That word is going to grow teeth and bite off the bloodiest chunk of your arse._

_And when it does—don’t come crying to me, little bird._

_You?_ Hans menaces aloud—here in his bedroom, where there is no one around to outroar him or slap his filthy mouth, and he is hidden among painted animals that won’t divulge any of a young lord’s secrets. He thinks of his man lying in a field with a rib sticking up out of his side.

 _You,_ he says to Uncle, _won’t be around forever._

It was a mean thought, even if it was true. Hanush was neither young nor the real lord. Rattay would forget him. And perhaps Hans thought it possible—if he taught Henry enough Latin; if he snapped another pretty buckle on his sleeve and gave him one more pair of fine black shoes; if he cut his hair and polished up his manners and put red meat on his plate and insisted he learn just the right number of French words—that Rattay would forget, after a while, this fine man in the Pirkstein yard had ever been a blacksmith.

Henry was still a long way from being mistaken for a courtier, of course. But his progress was nonetheless worthy of some real hopes. And, believe it or not: even his writing wasn’t entirely hope-less.

He plucks one last stubborn paper out of the back cover, smudgy with charcoal, and holds it up to the sunlight.

* * *

_DEAR MY LORD_

_One last thing about wicked blacksmiths. If you were here in this echoey old mineshaft just now, I’d throw you right down in the soot and fuck you til your squawking scared the last hairs off the old monks out in Sasau._

_Mind you don’t forget to pay Antonia for the trouble._

_x Henry_

* * *

One might even say he had his own special way with words.

Lord Capon brushes the angry little papers off, leaving them strewn across his covers and his floor. He does not feel like picking anything up right now. Instead, he locks his door behind him and hides in the little family chapel room with a gluttonous goblet of Hanush’s favorite wine, drinking the fire out of his impatience and the edge off his boredom. And Hans waits there, ho-humming, until Antonia walks by with an armful of wash—at which point, he springs.

“ _Wait_! Your husband,” the young lord cries, setting down his outlandish cup to bolt gawkishly for the hall. Antonia stands stock-still watching Hans stumble out after her; she squeezes her basket of laundry and stares, wordless, like a myrmidon who’s locked eyeballs with Medusa.

“Your husband,” he blurts, grabbing the other side of the basket for good measure, as if that will prevent her from hurrying off. “What’s his name?”

She can’t seem to decide between disbelief and dismay. So she doesn’t, and just answers, “Nicolaus.”

“Then have this. For Nicolaus, all right?” Hans grabs the money out of his pocket, but realizes with his fist full of groschen that he’s too lazy and just a gulp too drunk to count them. Undeterred, this Lord of Rattay simply drops the whole mess of metal atop shirts, blankets, dresses. He pats coins into the clean linens. “So your man doesn’t die with water in his lung.”

Antonia splutters something in return, but Hans isn’t interested in whatever it is. And so—how do you like that—he strolls away, leaving his cup on the chapel lectern and all his money in the laundry, and all Henry’s words on the bedroom floor.

Now he’s gotten rid of his riches. He only has the spoiled flower to carry, aimless, around.

**IV.**

There are no more letters for Hans Capon.

Instead—four or five days later—when the young lord is idling in a cool late-night bath, drinking sweet black wine with Klara and Marta and goading them with laughter and caramels to divulge who has the ugliest, crookedest cock in Rattay and getting the fine gold hairs behind his ears re-cut—Zdena pokes her head in from the April bugs merely to say:

_Your boy just rode in._

Marta barely lifts the hot surgeon’s razor from his neck before Hans comes hopping out of the tub, grabbing for a linen to dry off with. It crumples away from his head damp and full of delicate dark tendrils.

Klara, roosted on a ridiculous cushion and picking rose oil confections off sticky paper, holds out a sheet for Lord Capon’s decency—whatever apple rind is left of it, anyway. He messily wraps his nakedness, dashing for the line of dripping clothes.

“At Pirkstein?” Hans asks, rabbit heart kicking the drunkenness out of him, sounding strangled in the happiest way. Still bath-fresh, he has to fight his way back into his hose. His chin smarts a bit where Marta nicked him with the shaving blade—Klara’s fault for making him spit drink, coughing, at a joke—and his sopping jacket is unwearable, and the girls haven’t even bothered to perfume his fine silk shirt, but Henry doesn’t care what he smells like. The young lord hops assishly into one boot.

Zdena finds its partner flung by the door. Lingering at the stoop in shawl and nightgown, presumably bushed from a house-call, she tosses it his way. “At the high castle, I’m afraid. There’s some soldier with him. One would assume they are waiting for Sir Bernard to roll out of bed and take down a report, but I didn’t see the captain on my way downhill.”

He doesn’t fuss with sleeve ties or little gold buckles; he catches the boot and pulls it on. “What for?”

“Who knows? I didn’t say hello; poor lad can’t afford it. If you don't dilly-dally,” she suggests, even smarmier than usual in the aftermath of whoever’s cork she popped up there—for Birdie’s part, he’s already tripped over a pitcher in his hurry. “Maybe you’ll beat that mill girl.”

Hans does not even hear Zdena’s little jab, not really. He thanks his spy—it gives him pleasure to fashion them that way—for the news. He scrambles to find his belt and purse. He leaves the bathmaids to the wine and candies. And, like a doused little fishing bird, he is away.

Henry is waiting at the gate, as promised. It’s black as pitch up the grassy church hill and hardly anyone is awake—the sputtering plinths in the high castle courtyard work harder than Nightingale on evenings so hot. But Hans can pick out his boy at ten o’clock on a moonless night by the way he stands about. Some stablehand has already taken the horses to bed; Hal waits in the glow of insects and torchlight with both fists turned out on his hips, his tarnished basinet tucked under an arm, and a bored boot toe scraping at the cobbles. His shoulders are exhausted and his filthy gambeson shows every sweat stain and mile of sandy road. But his ribs are still inside him, and his body is solid, and there’s more than enough moon for a young lord to make it up there before any girl.

It’s hard to see much of anything, and he oughtn’t go running in the dark. But to hell with ought-to; Lord Capon gives his sleepy mare a cluck and a nudge in the ribs, and goes clacking brightly over the drawbridge, waking the bowyer’s whole family from their apartment down below. Bellona is an ominous blue-gray beast under the dim archway light without her caparison on, and he’s underdressed with his washed hair—he’s too clean and too new for the muggy night, for its smell of straw and wild sage and horseshit—his damp shirtsleeves are too white among old stone.

Hans has no idea who the other fellow loitering there is and doesn’t care at all. He pulls to a hard stop, annoying Bellona with the bit. It’s a sloppy entrance, but from here, he can see Hal’s face, and there’s not much else to give a damn about. His underlids are dark with the sleeplessness of living in tents, his scalp is a crusty mess, and his chin is rougher and patchier—but tired eyes can still go gentle, and a chapped mouth can still be soft. Hans stands there in the stirrups and squints so as not to look too delighted.

The two lads on the ground touch their shoulders and bow, a bit sluggish about it, and Hans nearly screeches to tears when he notices it is Ruda curtseying there beside him.

“God save, my lord,” Henry greets him evenly, mellow with fatigue, but truthfully, he’s always been better at this dance of not saying things too keenly or feeling too much. He does not so much as glance Ruda’s way. “We bring urgent news from Neuhof.”

Lord Capon sits wet and bright-eyed in the saddle, looking down at the dirty soldiers, because he’s sure if he set one foot on the ground, it would be that much harder not to throw his arms around Henry and plant a kiss on his dirty hair.

(He won’t do that, of course. Not only in recognition of the lukewarm reception their lord’s piss-poor performance of _Troilus and Criseyde Reunite in the Garden_ would receive from the nightwatch, but because if Hans made such a God-damned spectacle of himself in front of Hal, throwing arms and whatnot, the mud-guzzling mallethead would never let him live it down.)

So he narrows harder, endeavoring to appear more like a mean cat in a windowsill than a person who would very much like Ruda to go anywhere else. “It’s not good news, I take it, being the middle of the night.”

“The farthest thing from it—and I hate to say so, your Lordship,” Ruda answers, standing straight-backed opposite Henry, half as dusty and looking like a proper city spearman between his black beard and shiny helm. He feels entitled to explain things to Sir Hans, given his family’s wealth and his occasional posting in the governor’s personal guard. A thousand years ago—when he had more chub in his cheeks and less hair and more snot—Ruda ran in Lord Capon’s pack of noble brat-boys (at least until baby Birdie tired of having sycophants for friends). Naturally, the good man now detests his Lordship's hide just as hotly as the next burgher does. But he is at least smart enough to laugh at Hans's jokes. “Our scouts at the stud farm spotted a band northwest of the charcoal burners on the Uzhitz road. We’ve already sent a man to roust the captain.”

Sir Hans frowns in his saddle. He tugs the reins to stop Bellona’s itching at her knee. “That’s troublesome,” he concurs, trying to sound as manorial as one can when he is ten minutes out of his bathwater. “But unless Sir Radzig has reason to believe it is related to the attack on Goodman Smil, I don’t appraise a few highwaymen in the woods as something out-of-the-ordinary—do you?”

“It’s not simple as all that. From what the patrolmen at Neuhof say—” Henry doesn’t get to finish his thought.

“They’ve got colors, my lord,” Ruda swears, running right over the village blacksmith just to beat him to the punch. “I saw the stripes myself; I was with the guard who spotted them on our evening post. They carried a standard and are camped somewhere in the area.”

“Ah. A robber baron, then.”

“It’s worse. Word came this evening that a—”

“Apparently, my lord,” Ruda cuts, “someone’s robbed a farmstead farther up the junction. It’s likely that very group.”

“And I reckon it’s the same band whose tracks I reported to you weeks ago, which means they’re not just wandering ‘round arse-over-ankles. They’re either patrolling or setting up defenses. For—”

This time, Ruda’s interruption jams a poker into Hal’s temper. He stands in-place with his road-beaten clothes and ashy eyes and fires Hans a suffering _I told you so_ of a look.

“There’s been a smattering of attacks on travelers using those byroads over the past month, your Lordship,” Ruda tells him, oblivious to Sir Hans’s amused eyebrows or Henry’s deadpan stare or their shared humor. “Captain Bernard had them figured for Cumans, but I would venture to guess these men are responsible for most of the predation. If not all of it.”

“It’s worser still. I—”

“There may well be more of them than I first gleaned, my lord. The Uzhitz bridleways are overgrown this time of year, and with the game warden—”

“Are you going to let me fucking talk,” Henry snaps, finally. Bellona jangles her bridle in protest. Ruda clamps his jaw shut and steams beneath his spit-shined helm.

He waits a beat to determine whether or not the man’s rude mouth will stay closed for good. When it’s only crickets, Hal turns again to Hans, but his brow is worried, and something crinkles beneath Lord Capon’s bitten-back joy. 

“The colors on the standard,” Henry says, and the tendon tightens behind his jaw. “It’s the House of Oleshna.”

And Hans is tipsy, sitting there on his grulla mare—not drunk as a fish, but just enough to splash the Father-shaped demon from his brain and flatten the devil dander along his back. But there’s no flavor or fancy bottle or raw quantity of wine that might make that name slide down easy. The thorn of _Oleshna_ gets lodged like a scale in his throat.

“Are you sure?” he presses, tugging the reins again as Bellona cracks her tail behind him. Hans has taught the blacksmith of local livery and family signets, but perhaps he’s wrong. Henry’s wrong about all sorts of things.

“Positive, sir. Mint on white and a black sturgeon.”

“Fuck. That _is_ worse news.”

They don’t have anything more to tell him. So—too distracted to fight a bored horse any longer—Hans swings a leg over his saddle and dismounts, whistling for the night groom to come take Bellona away. The stiff courtyard cobbles clack hard against the undersides of his boots and shake a few droplets of drink from his brain. His tomorrow’s mind is all ascramble, but tonight, he cannot help standing three paces from Henry and letting bad fucking news go to dandelion seeds in his chest.

“Well, you’ll not have to tell Bernard alone, at least. Come on.” He passes his mare to the sleepy stablehand and beckons his soldiers trot along with a halfhearted nod. “We’ll await the captain in the hall.”

The young lord—and one day they’ll stop calling him that, since the old lord’s been dead for years and one day, he’ll stop thinking it, too—leads them inside. They follow him one-two up the wooden stairs and into the castle, Ruda lancing in second, and the blacksmith left trailing behind. Hans stomps overhard on each step so as not to pick out Henry’s footsteps after him. It’s best not to look for a while—at this height, Hans is only a few inches taller, close enough to grab his road-rough chin and scratch the excess of brownish growth with his fingernails; close enough to see his lungs lift and fall; close enough to feel embarrassingly aware of everything Hal does, whether he looks or not—and it’s hardly enough space to respect the distance a lord ought to maintain.

It is enough distance, however, to reach the door first. He fishes from his belt the cold black key that will let them all in, but everything’s dark. Hanush’s seat at the mighty feast table’s head seems the emptiest of them all—so Lord Capon waves in a passing guardsman to light candles, then asks the unlucky bastard to roust his uncle. Alas, he hasn’t a key to these liquor cabinets with which to cut the awkwardness of imminent silence. And so, thirsty, Sir Hans perches on an edge of the polished table and dangles his heels as they wait among the torchlit deer heads, watching the fireplace wake up, wiggling its fingers of light over the black tree eaves painted on these castle walls.

Ruda’s too apprehensive to sit. But Henry, God save, scrapes out a chair and plops right down a few places left of his impolite governor, dancing his anxious legs, folding his callused hands nicely as if someone might bring him hot bread. The half-dark makes it no easier not to adore him. Lord and burgher and village hayseed, they wait quietly amongst each other until the cavalry arrives.

Hanush and Bernard kick into the quiet with a thunder and a huff. They yell at Hans when he clumsily breaks the news—then yell at Henry when he interjects with a dozen useless details—and yell at Ruda, too, just to be fair. They drag him just outside into the guards’ vestibule to point out on Bernard’s charts where Bernard’s cousin is camped. The captain’s anger incinerates his sense of decorum completely. He hollers himself red as a whore’s slapped arsecheek— _Wolflin_ this and _Kamberg_ that—and Ruda hunkers over the strategy table, mortified, trying to illustrate the Oleshnitz fish while his whole arm trembles in the socket.

Hans watches all this through the blown-open door, hovering, a little less drunk now than he was a moment ago. He slips into the chair next to Henry and props his elbows up to wait for some milk and bread, too.

It’s maddening to sit next to your favorite friend and not talk to him, but talk about real things will have to wait. Henry smells like horse and dried sweat and sprouting weeds and Hans wouldn’t mind breathing the stink of him if it meant he could scoot closer. For now, he leans in ever so slightly, and without turning his head, whispers to the side of Hal’s face:

 _Blacksmith_.

“Oh?" the blacksmith asks, lashy and innocuous as a calf, playing stupid, pointing a finger towards his chest as if to mock the notion. "Me, sir?"

Henry thinks he’s coy with his blithe _oh_?s, the buckethead, but there’s this one traitorous chord in his throat that always betrays the intensity of his interest.

“I have something to ask you,” Hans confesses, leagues coyer than a blacksmith could ever be; Lord Capon lets his voice drop like a bobber with a heavy catch flicking its basstail on the end. The fireplaces pops with twigs and he scissors two fingers around a pewter candlestick to drag it near, warming the underside of his face. The little firelight flickers between them and he weans his eyes to slits. “Something important. And before you ask, no, it can’t wait. And I need your full attention, Henry. And I need you to listen to every single sordid little word I’m about to say.”

“Oh…?”

“Did you,” Hans asks, and stops, and bats his lashes, and dares Henry to choke up another stupid _oh_.

And then he thumps his folded fist on the table and smashes the intrigue and makes Hal jump back and throws on the ugliest old snarl he’s got.

“ _Did_ you,” Hans bitches, “tell the fucking bailiff I ordered Antonia into my service?”

“Oh,” Henry chuckles, sheepish this time, clacking all the scattered marbles back together in his head. Beyond the hall, Hanush slams a leftover cup of water onto the floor and upends Bernard’s empty chair with his toe. Hal sounds a touch deflated, like he’d expected to be asked something else. “Yes. I did tell him that.”

“You spoke on my behalf? You _made up_ manorial orders?”

“Well, just a little bit. You don’t have to say it like that.”

“God damn you, man! We’re not talking about tavern menus and whorehouse calls. Are you completely insane?” Hans squawks, unable to keep his sharp chin from snapping even sharper to glare at Henry. His voice warbles in its effort to keep quiet, no longer _psst-psst_ but now a sharp buzz. “I’m your fucking governor,” he hisses, stomping the blacksmith’s filthy boot. Hal yanks it away, ouches, and—under the flimsy cover of this grand table—retaliates by shoving his governor’s knee. “I could have your whole blockhead for that. Chop it off at the fucking neck, you stupid yaldson!”

Hans would whop him upside the skull if Uncle wasn’t so likely to see it. But Henry, dumb bunny, still looks mostly unfazed.

“Have you done this any other times?” He’s delighted by Hal’s cheek and offended by his gall all at once, not certain he wants the answer. The blacksmith innocently thinks it over, tapping his cheek. Windy April has cracked his bottom lip in three places and pinked the bridge of his nose. He isn’t lying—Hans can tell—but there’s an insouciance about him that suggests he isn’t being one hundred percent honest, either.

“No,” he concludes, mild as a maid. “Not that I recall.”

“Not that you _recall_?”

Henry shrugs again, ho-hum, as if he knows that nothing gets Hans’s goat quite like it—and like he knows Hans knows he knows that, too. “I may have slightly exaggerated your words here and there.”

“Meaning?”

“Well. If I knew you _meant_ to do something—or that you surely _would_ do something, if you knew about it—”

“To think I called you a rebel. My mistake. You’re a bloody usurper.” Lord Capon snorts, leaning back in his creaky chair, crossing both arms at the vacant hall around him. “Unbelievable.”

“Maybe if you saw to governing every now and again, I’d feel less inclined, your Lordship.”

“You’re fucking lucky I’m too joyous right now to bust your mouth, you chawbacon.”

They have to fight and play in nips and whispers, but it’s all right. If this is now, then so there’ll be a later, too. Later, after the sister castles in Rattay are dark again and everyone has gone back to sleep, Hans will peep out of his bedroom, look both ways, and hotfoot down the hallway in bare feet, sprinting outside. He will shadow-hop just enough so that the Pirkstein nightwatch will pretend not to see him. He’ll scurry down the terrace its back way, just to feel sneaky, picking the wooden stairs that promise to creak least, and then he’ll make a last crazy-fox dash to the little bailey with its little room, where Hal will be waiting. He’ll either be feigning sleep or accidentally sleeping, but either way, Hans will wake him. They’ll lark about, and they’ll jump around, and they’ll likely squabble over who will assume the champion role, but they’ll figure it out, and once they do, they’ll have a go at it right there in Henry’s coarse and musty bed. And then—finally—they’ll talk. They’ll talk too much, jabbering well past the point where Hans should leave, but won’t, for he will have already determined to spend the night there, and so will make the awful mattress far more uncomfortable with his too-hot heat and kicking legs until auburn daybreak wakes him, and he will slink back into his castle up the servants’ stairs, leaving Henry tucked in a deep and—God be good to him—dreamless sleep.

That is later. For now, Hans watches Bernard boil clamshell purple in the vestibule, and flattens a drip of candlewax with his thumb.

“Tell that,” he sulks, “to your hairless monks.”

The blacksmith looks so smug, sitting with his tatty red scarf and his fingers laced, that Hans thinks about waiting for Ruda to look this way and lunging over to open one of Hal’s split lips back up with his teeth. “Got my letters, did you.”

“I only want you to know: you couldn’t throw me anywhere if your life depended on it.”

“I don’t think I’d have to, sir. I think all I’d have to do is give you a good flick and you’d flop right over. I think you’d just lie there with your arse in the air and squirm like a catfish.”

“I’m going to fucking mangle you,” Hans swears, embarrassed—hardly able to believe he could still be embarrassed—feeling his neck and jaw spark as red as a crisp red radish and absolutely furious about it. “Wait and see. I’ll wring you out like a dish towel.”

The young lord has a few more threats to promise. But they’ll have to wait; his uncle trundles back in, grunting like a sow and cub the whole way, Bernard pacing circles in his wake. Ruda is left behind to listen to the captain’s harsh bootheels and pore helplessly over the map.

“Henry,” Hanush ruffs. Hans, freshly united with his darling boy, knows another separation in miniature is coming and means to hate his uncle just a little for it. But instead, Uncle’s sleepless eyes look as though they’ve been battered with charcoal and hung up on a laundry line, and seeing him so exhausted scrapes the whiskers off such selfish passions. “Get up, get out, and go on to bed, will you?”

“You didn’t need anything more from me, sir?”

“Lad, the only thing I need from you right now,” Hanush persists, sighing, scrubbing his wrinkled brow, “is the back of your head walking through the door.”

Henry scrapes up, wordless. He bows. He leaves. He is no longer right next to Hans anymore, who has to bite down on his dog-whimpering heart before it pushes him out of his chair.

It is folly to watch Hal walk out—for it’s only an hour or two, anyway—and, no matter how hard Hans wishes, Henry won’t dare look back. But not-watching is folly, too, for Hans can never manage it, and even the back of Hal’s head is enough to prove he will not be alone for a while.

_Even you,_ Uncle had warned him.  
He’d warned him a thousand times, tapping the silvers in his great beard:  
 _Even you won’t stay young forever, little bird._

Tonight, Hanush will want to have words with him. And Hans is not so young a lord he won’t hear them—not so foolish or drunk or bad that he does not understand there will be bloody work ahead. But alack, he is also not yet old and not yet godly and not yet good enough to stay still among his painted walls and rule.

He barges up, spring-heeled. He does not ask for permission or wait for an answer. He blurts that Henry’s forgotten something, something important, something they can’t do without knowing, and before any of these lordly people can say anything about it, Hans bolts out the door and out under the dark sky.

He catches Henry on the last stair. Hal looks at him like he’s lost his cockered mind in a puddle of bitter red wine, but for all his letters and their one hundred _oh_ s, there’s a spot of wickedness in a blacksmith, after all.

 _Go back, you goose,_ he gripes, pointing the loose young lord into his castle. _Are you trying to get me bullwhipped?_ he twines, protesting, even as the smile cracks his angry face stupid and enkindles his sleepy eyes. _No, no,_ he groans, relenting, as Hans gallops down the final steps. _Don’t you have some governing to do?_

Lord Capon doesn’t care for yes or no. But he does pull a wilted fistful from his pocket, and, as a good friend should, delivers the marigold into Henry’s hand. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **LAST HISTORY NOTES:** 1\. The Middle Ages largely lacked for standardized spelling, so Henry’s letters really shouldn’t be as hopeless as they’re made out to be in this piece. (They also shouldn’t have so much punctuation, but for the sake of readability, let’s pretend.)
> 
> 2\. I’m using the approximate diminutive “Birdie” (for the historical Jan Ptáček) as an epithet for Hans here in addition to keeping the surname Warhorse gave their fictionalized version (Capon). Why? Because a birdie is an annoying little spitfire. And a capon is a castrated rooster. Both are equally Hanslike and I will not choose.


	2. Act One: The Most Important Things

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **CHAPTER WARNINGS** : M. Overt sexual content: partial love scene/flashback. Not explicit, but obvious. Mentions of sex work. 
> 
> **HISTORICAL NOTE** : “Dear So-and-So” is not really a standard medieval letter address. For more info on some limitations and considerations to keep in mind when studying medieval letters (or writing fictional ones of your own), [check this out.](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290940964_Medieval_letters_and_letter_collections_as_historical_sources_Methodological_questions_and_reflections_and_research_perspectives_6_th-14th_centuries)

╭╼|══════════|╾╮ _  
_

_I cannot any cause discover  
_ _Except my will to be thy lover,  
And boldly challenge any man  
To name another, if he can._

— IBN HAZM

╰╼|══════════|╾╯

The first letter anyone had ever sent him went:

_Dear Henry,_

_It is my regret that I have not yet told you how sorry I am over the death of your father._

_Yours was among the finest families in Silver Skalitz, and it a grave unfairness to have lost them. A mourning son has little care for a lord’s opinion on his beloveds, but it is mine, and now you know._

_It would grieve me to think you might never understand the extent of your father’s mastery, and perhaps you were told that he served my militia in Prague before he served me as a blacksmith. But I’d wager you were not told that it was Martin who trained me in swordplay. He was more than my match when we were your age—and I expect he was at the end of his life, too._

_Above all, Henry, it is important to me that you understand your father—though a soldier—was not a man of violence, and I confess it troubles me that I have sent you down his path. I know he did not want this for you._

_Alas, my castle is now in ruins, so I have nothing more to offer you but my condolences. Would that I could have made it happen any other way, I would have._

_I really am sorry for it all._

_EX TEMPESTATE LIBERTAS_ _  
_

_Sir Radzig_

* * *

He read it once—only once—and that was that. It took him a long time (on account of all the scholarly words), and Henry didn’t ask anyone for help. When he’d finally carved his way through, sounding out His Lordship’s spelling and his meanings bit-by-bit, it felt too late to respond and there seemed nothing in the world smart enough to say. He folded the paper up small, humbled in the modest candlelight of his little bailey room, his breath shaky and his hands sweating. He slipped Sir Radzig’s regards into his satchel. And here he kept _I really am sorry_ , tucked away.

Everyone is very sorry about what happened to Father.

So many people, in fact, had apologized to Henry, he’d lost count. People who knew Pa were so sorry: Sir Divish and Antonia and Master Feyfar. People who didn’t know Pa were awfully sorry, too: Nightingale and Hermann and Master Blacksmith Mikesh in Sasau. Henry supposes he should be grateful. Jaroslav said he fought like a lion. Johanka said that under all the grease and charcoal, he was the kindest man in all of Skalitz. Elishka said he must have been a fine father, indeed, if he raised a nice boy like you.

But nobody said anything about Ma.

He doesn’t read Sir Radzig’s letter again, but he doesn’t have to. Every time he so much as thinks about it, he has the same dream.

* * *

_It is April when Neuhof is burned. The men in leather come out of the dark spruces and lop any live thing they catch. Then men in steel come from the city to pull down the black barns and haul the bodies away._

That’s Rosey, _Mark says, pointing with his elbow and snuffling into the crook. Henry wishes the stable boys wouldn’t tell him about their dead horses, but they do. He helps Ruda rope all the mares’ forelegs together so they will be easier to drag, and he stumbles as a raincloud bursts and his boots sink hopelessly into the muck, and he listens to all of these names._ That’s Chollima and Boxer and Kelpie. That’s Odessa and Syrup. And Lavender, and Bodkin, and Albína and Cecilia and Lace…

_Henry says I’m very sorry it happened._

_The little chub pond under Zlata’s willow tree has been fouled by a hamstrung colt and must be drained. Jakub digs the trench all alone, cursing angels by name as the sky turns soupy and undoes his work. When it’s shallow enough, they haul the rotting body out, stepping on frogs and old fish bones, uprooting the bulrushes. Horse blood looks thin on the air-pocked mud._

_Henry says truly it’s a horrible thing._

_They break down the scorched outbuilding and chop it to bits so it doesn’t fall on someone. Fire has gnawed the boards crusty and white, like a hound on a cow’s leg. Outside, the roof caves in the middle, reminding him of a smile someone’s punched. Inside, horse ribs jut out of pale ash like crumbled teeth._

_Henry says he wishes there was something he could do._

_It takes the Rattay guard two days to clean up the worst of the mess. It rains for another. The knacker won’t move in this weather—says it can’t be done, says the ground’s too fickle and the flesh will flay right off the bone, says it’s just not feasible until May—but as soon as the sun peeks out of its shell, Master Hermann arrives instead with his cart. Henry tries to help Zora and her men carry their dead out of the cellar, where they’ve been swaddled in linens and left in the dark. But Jakub won’t let any of the soldiers near them. Instead, he rallies Mark and Samuel and even poor Zlata, and he won’t take no for an answer. Stableboys maneuver stray limbs and sling broken backs into the executioner’s wagon. Bernard boils silently, furious at all of it: the butchery, the bandits, his own inability to help. Ruda and Mojmir are exhausted. But as for Henry—he hides in a little lean-to and pets the hens; he runs his fingers over silky feathers; he does not have to look at the blotted lips or snarled fingers of the dead. He feels a selfish, cowardly relief._

_He emerges only to watch Hermann pull away. Zora does not weep. She stands with her thumbnails bitten between her front teeth and watches the wheels labor in the mud. The wrapped bodies—Smil among them—rattle as Bernard gives the wagon a last bull’s charge of a push, and Hermann yells at the horses, and it finally lurches free._

_The dead cart struggles off to the graveyard down the sloppy spring road. The mares are left behind to burn._

_Henry says maybe it’s not meant to be understood._

_In his memory—and in his dream—he inevitably finds himself pulled back to the pond. He walks the little dock to the end and looks in._

_The water is dark and cold with rain. There is no murdered horse inside anymore, but if he looks too closely—past the murky silt and his own reflection—he wonders if the fish have seen it. He wonders what a tiny animal thinks of seeing such things._

_A perchtail flicks inside the skin of his face. He leans toward the water._

_He says I really am sorry about it all._

Henry _, Ma answers, her voice plunging through his face and into the surface of his dream._

* * *

He bolts up the snap of his name. The castle of horse bones collapses. He is sitting in his little room.

It’s a cool dawn on Pirkstein hill. Blue swallows plummet between the towers to snatch their breakfast; watchmen clank the catwalks with their spears; hens bicker in the courtyard. Above them all, the first volley of sun pierces Lord Capon’s green glass window, seeking its disciple, hoping to roust him for a morning hunt. But it finds the young lord’s blankets empty. Some other animal will have to make the day’s first kill.

The sun has better luck looking for its quarry elsewhere. Pink light slices under a loose board of the bailey lodge roof, where Henry twists in a sheet with cold sweat rolling down his ribs, and his thighs twitch like a jackrabbit strung upside-down.

 _Henry_ , someone says again. _What’s wrong with you? Wake up._

Henry wakes up. Hans is here—straightaway—so suddenly solid and so solid gold it’s as if the sunlight snapped its fingers and alchemized him right at the foot of the bed. He’s sitting on the side of the lumpy mattress, too smart in his silver snaps and black bootheels, and his crimson brocade looks as red as a bucket of blood slopped on the grass. Mostly, though, he looks worried. He releases Henry’s wrists, and it’s only then a sleepy blacksmith realizes it was his voice—not Ma’s—that splashed up through the God-awful lake. Lord Capon has yanked him out of the dream.

Dreams aside, it’s just Hans. Henry lets his shoulders slack, and he shoves all his visions of splintered hooves and charred shinbones and cracked horse jaws away.

“You’re all right, Hal,” Hans agrees, though his fine face is stern, as you must be when you are calming a large animal spooked by fire. “It’s over.”

He recognizes where he is now. He knows the uneven stuffing of his bed and the dank smell of the stables next door. He knows the sounds of Pebbles mouthing his empty feed trough, then stomping, then pissing for twelve seconds straight (which at least means he’s very much alive). He knows Pirkstein. Still, Henry must take a moment to return to himself, sitting here in this infant sunlight. He must listen for the groom shoveling manure outside and for Antonia’s footsteps creaking up the stairwell and for Jaroslav’s good morning chuckle on the battlements. And—most of all, of course—he must watch the young governor of all this watch him back with an awkward sympathy.

“You’re trembling like an old bitch,” Hans observes, brow furrowed, not yet sure if it’s safe to laugh. 

Henry feels as soggy as an oatcake dropped in a puddle. His hands are quaking, as they sometimes do. His words wobble, and his voice cracks. “I noticed.”

“Well, I’m glad you decided to knock out of it. You were staring right through me, as if I were a—a—a fucking wraith or something. I thought I was going to have to sock you in the chop! Don’t you want some… I don’t know,” Hans tries, looking around the grubby lodge, spying the bedside ewer. “Some water?”

Henry waves him off, but he springs up anyway, snatching and thrusting it over. Stale drink sloshes inside. It annoys Henry, freshly torn out of his nightmare, and he pushes the pitcher aside.

It’s the best Hans can do. He stands there, golden and uncertain, with nothing to help. “Do you want to tell me about your ma?”

The blacksmith shakes _no_ to this, too, and perhaps Hans expected as much, for he replaces the ewer without any more fuss. Even so, Henry wonders what he must have said aloud to invite such a question.

“Fine,” Hans resolves, but it’s just a bit of sport. He’s not cruel enough to push—not about this—and thumps down beside him on the bed again. “Brood like a sultan. See if I care.”

Hans is no good at comfort. A rich man is frustrated by things he cannot fix with gifts and wine and money. He had no one to cook him carrot soup and pet his sick head when he was little—did not even have a proper Pa or Ma to mourn, not really—and, for a moment, Henry feels so badly for him that he reaches out to pet the young lord’s face himself. His thumb rounds a cheek and lingers where he knows the dimple lies.

“Are you leaving?” Henry asks when Hans stands again, too full of sunlight to sit there and let his face be touched.

“I was, but I’ll put you back to sleep, if you like.”

He crosses the dim room, propping a boot on the ramshackle stool to finish doing up his buckles. Hans is irregularly handsome for his surroundings—not just now in this dingy lodge, but often—especially in the forest, when he sparkles on some muddy shore or in a spidery bed of pine needles, bright as a lucky coin someone dropped. But Henry is used to it, and so forgets, sometimes, to really look at him.

“I’m not keen on sleeping just yet.”

“Don’t you want to have my room? You’d be better off in there than in this shithole,” he offers, boosting the stool away with the flat of his sole the instant he’s done with it. It thunks the wall and annoys Pebbles on the other side (who will be getting grumpy by now, waiting on his grains and listening to men’s voices nattering nearby).

He’s right, of course; this mattress is stuffed with straw; Hans sleeps on duck feathers and soft linens. But Henry isn’t convinced he won’t resume his nightmare. So he sits up fully, hanging his bare calves over the edge, and presses both palm heels into the deep craters of his eyes.

“Where are you going?”

“Business regarding last night’s report, obviously. Uncle had me draft and dispatch an official warning. In the meantime, he has doubtless consulted his scribes and I expect we’ll hear from the scoundrel sometime today—if we haven’t already.” He pauses in buttoning a sleeve, his stare purloining the delicate light until it looks less gray than bronze. It always smells a bit like toasted oats and smashed apples and mare piss in here, but Henry’s learned not to notice, and it takes a good deal more than some stink to chase Lord Capon away. “What do you care about it, anyway? Are you planning on issuing more horseshit orders?”

“Haven’t decided yet.” Henry’s yawn is as big and punch-provoking as his overhead stretch. “I’ll have to consult my scribes.”

Hans takes him out with a pillow to the mouth. Henry chokes, but catches it, and they squabble like dogs over a sausage until the last ripped horse throat is knocked from his head and the cushion is swatted free.

“It’s not so easy as you think, you know,” Henry notes as Hans slaps the dust off his pillow for him. The sack of wool doesn’t fluff very well, but all the same, he plunks it back upon the modest bed. Then he plunks himself at the foot, one knee bent under him and the other swinging merrily, polished boot toe dragging the ground. Like that—like there’s no one else in the world worth it—he listens to the blacksmith talk.

“Do I even want to know what you’re prattling on about?”

“Order-giving, of course. Those burghers scramble to take me at my word. It’s the villagers that’ll run me around. They’ll say, _‘Lord Capon, eh? If it’s young Birdie’s orders, how come I didn’t hear anything about it?’_ And I’ll puff up like a loaded bastard,” he adds, trading his wrinkled old fishwife nose for stiff shoulders and a gusty breath, “and I’ll say, _‘You tell me, you cross-eyed hedge-born shit-scraper! Do you have any fucking idea who I am? When I ride back to Pirkstein and tell Sir Hans why there’s no God-damned cattle in his fields, I’m going to give him your fucking name!’_ That really gets them scurrying.”

“Bullshit,” Hans insists, but that flicker in his eye grows ever-so-slightly keener, and he looks like he wants to believe it.

“Sometimes”—Henry scoops up his pillow to demonstrate—“I even grab them by the collar and give a little shake.”

“Are you having fun at me, beet-picker?” Hans demands, watching the blacksmith throttle his abused cushion. “Are you yanking my fucking leash right now?”

“I suppose you’ll never know, will you?”

This time, Hans foregoes the courtesy of a pillow and simply thwacks his lowest rib. Henry retaliates by grabbing a fistful of fancy crimson shirt, dragging and locking his whole lordly head under an arm, and they tussle in miniature again. It’s Hans who ends it with a scrappy elbow in the meatiest part of his shank.

Henry releases his captive to rub his stung leg. “Either way,” he hisses, then laughs one hearty laugh of satisfaction. “Doesn’t seem so cheeky now—me having had a small word with the bailiff about poor Antonia.”

Hans looks less cavalier about the notion than he did last night, back when they were only swapping barbs behind candlelight. He seems less playful, too, and stands up, for the sun is brand new, and that means Lord Birdie cannot sit still.

“Just don’t ever do it again, all right?” he asks, tugging his rumpled shirtsleeves straight, righting the silver buckle of his belt. “You can’t go around governing at the edges for me.”

“I’ll try to remember that, sir.”

“You’d damned well better. If Uncle found out you were loping about the countryside, spouting commands in my name, I believe he’d kill you. Really, I do.”

Henry is no longer trembling. He’s run out of questions to ask, and Hans has run out of reasons to stay, so the young lord claps his hands together as though to strike the inertia from the air. With every sudden noise he makes, it seems a bird might fall, shot, from the sky.

“Well,” he offers; Henry’s only jumped a little bit. “If you won’t sleep, let me have a bath drawn for you. You smell like a sick cow.” (An insult that loses some of its quills when said by someone who spent the night with his face dug into the pit of your arm.)

“At this hour?”

“I’ll have Antonia do it. She shouldn’t mind. I’ll take it in my chambers and you can let yourself in when you like.”

Henry snorts, but the notion of steaming water and perfumed clothes pilfered from Hans’s wardrobe is enticing; he won’t put up much fight. “I’m to just stroll in at my leisure, is that it? And if she should catch me having a good soak, with my heels tossed up on the side of her governor’s tub?”

Hans slats his eyelids indignantly, unafraid of chambermaid trouble. “Then she’ll have to keep her fucking mouth shut for the good of her gurgling husband, won’t she? Besides,” he caws, cracking his knuckles and shaking them loose. Henry’s hands are cold, and he thinks he might not mind if Hans should get it in his head to hold them, but he won’t ask, and has no such luck. “Do you think anyone in this city wastes an ounce of their brain fretting about where you dip your peasant arse?”

Hans is never cold. But as he lingers there in front of the tatty door, full of cantankerous energy, dallying to argue just a little more, Henry can’t help but make fun of him. “I have a suspicion it’s crossed your mind a time or two.”

“I’ll slit your throat, you cur.”

But he doesn’t, and Henry isn’t clever enough this early to whip up something lippier. Instead, he sighs out the last of his sleep, and when his lungs are empty and the red twinge has faded from everything but Hans’s shirt, he thinks about getting up, too.

“I’ll come and find you later,” Hans promises, fixes his collar, and pats his swordless hip in a way one might describe as threatening. “So don’t run off into the hills. Bernard could oust us soon as this morning.”

“I only just get back in the dark of last night, barely reacquaint myself to my own bed, and you’d drag me out afield by the ears again?”

“Of course. If there’s really to be a baron-hunt, I’ll need a willing victim to come along. In case I want to practice my maneuvers.”

It’s not his best rib, but Henry feels obligated to give it a try. “That’s me, is it. Your _willing victim_. And all this time I thought I was your page.”

“Dolt, don’t you know it’s the same thing,” Hans sasses, pinches the tender skin under his breast, and leaves him a kiss on the head.

Then—like a spear of sunlight killing a cloud—he’s lunged through the door, and he’s off.

Henry considers dressing. He thinks of warm biscuits and syruped strawberries. He tries to imagine all there is in the whole wide daylight world to hunt and chase and laugh about. But in the end, he finds he cannot be like Hans Capon. His body is too sore and his heart is too slow and his head still sifts through the ashes of his dream.

He lies back down and he settles. And, alone, he sleeps.

**II.**

****

_From His Lordship Hans Capon, Governor of Rattay  
_ _and Sir Hanush of Leipa, Steward of Rattay  
_ _for personal delivery to Sir Wolflin von Kamberg  
_ _with expectation of immediate address and response_

_Dear Sir,_

_You may take this message as an acknowledgement of your unlawful incursion into the holdings personally enfeoffed to my family by His Divine Majesty Our King Wenceslaus IV. You may also take it as my promise as the sole inheritor of Rattay and its environs that your trespass will be met with swift and overwhelming violence._

_Finally—if you are opposed to swift and overwhelming violence—you may take this message as my only offer to parley._

_Please attend to your response with good haste or be, regrettably, crushed._

_God be With Ye,_

_LORD HANS CAPON OF RATTAY_

_signed also by_

_SIR HANUSH OF LEIPA_

* * *

_To the scribe of Sir Hanush of Leipa  
for dictation to His Worthy Lordship,  
_ _from his humble peer WOLFLIN VON KAMBERG_

_My Gracious and Inimitable Lords,_

_Correct me if I am mistaken, but I believe it is Sir Hanush who holds our king’s sole authority to speak for Rattay._

_Dear sirs! You have my gratitude for your acknowledgement of my arrival and for your courteous address. I regret not announcing myself in a friendlier fashion, but I have heard from a great number of Bohemians that His Lordship’s recent intertest in ironwork leaves him often indisposed. I would hate to be impolite._

_The woods are lovely this time of spring and I have no intention of leaving, but my men and I would be honored to host your distinguished selves in my camp, ideally to discuss the nature of our visit and my dispute with my land-thieving cousin. That is meant to impugn Milota, of course—not my dear Cousin Bernard, who lacks even a smallholding._

_Kindly relay my message to Sir Hanush, and do take the liberty of adjusting any language you deem too unseemly or complex for the young Ješek, who I understand remains the largest legal child in Bohemia._

_JESUS SAVE._

_WOLFLIN VON KAMBERG_

* * *

_From Lord Hans Capon  
_ _to Wolflin von Kamberg_

_Good Man,_

_Listen here, you fat-necked Bavarian. Those are my hunting grounds you’re despoiling—and if you’ve any interest in not being killed upon them like a rank boar, you’ll roll up your tents and mosey the fuck on back to Kamberg._

_As is considered customary, allow me to announce my intentions in advance of our parley, those intentions being to kick your robbing, landless carcass all the way to your grandmother’s grave in Oleshnitz. To clarify, I will crack that big bald head of yours like a whore’s arsecheeks, you big, stupid Strauber bastard. I will bust your melon. I will jettison your spaetzle-bloated corpse off a scenic hillside. I will float you up the Vltava in a sausage skin, you short-cocked, beef-humping hairless_ _cuckold._

_So if you’ve great interest in being alive for next Christmas, don’t be there when my men arrive._

_God Save,_

_LORD HANS CAPON_

**III.**

It is still very early in the morning when a rickety knock wakes Henry from another red dream.

He can tell by the nature of the knuckles it’s not Lord Capon. It’s Janek, come to roust him in time to join Bernard and the others before their ride to Wolflin’s camp. Henry dresses hurriedly to meet them, forgetting his fork and canteen; he is always afraid of being left behind.

The morning is blue and foggy, dotted with plum irises and little black swifts. They leave Rattay in a shroud of mist. By the time their company hops the river to Lord Capon’s best hunting camp, it is evening, and a yellow sun glisters over the wet beech leaves. Henry’s brigandine is spongey under his garrison waffenrock and his bascinet is rain-cold, drip-dropping over his nose. He unsaddles Pebbles at the hitching fence and watches the soldiers park in the soft flowering earth along the creek.

Lord Capon is the last man off his horse—unlike him. He clops up the camp hill on Menelaus, his bulky red destrier that throws its war shoes out too far on the path. He is fresh-faced enough over his carven gorget and atop his fine quilted saddle. But as the sullen captain barks orders, chasing Janek and Jaroslav off to gather water, Henry can’t help but notice the irritating way Hans plucks at the strap beneath his pauldron. He leaves Pebbles a little kiss behind the ear and wanders across the packed dirt lot to see.

“What’s wrong,” he demands of the lord on the warhorse, each snap of that loose buckle reeling his tension higher. He almost forgets to tack on the _Sir Hans_.

Sir Hans’s brow furrows as he yanks off a gauntlet, digging one whole finger under the layered steel where his shoulder connects to his ribs, twisting it as if to sate an ichy bit. He looks at Henry only from the corner of one eye. It’s still a very pretty eye, even though he clearly hasn’t slept much with it, and his handsomeness irritates Henry worse. “Nothing.”

“Something, though.”

“It’s just—this harness,” he admits, frowning harder, squaring his chin and giving the buckle up. Hans stands in the stirrup and twists his back about as though to relieve his breastplate’s squeeze. “The fit’s a little fucked up.”

It’s unnerving to be at the creek camp with other people. Watching guardsmen drop their gear around the same fire pit where they cook poached rabbits and sleep snarled up together makes Henry want to go home so badly he can hardly stand to talk.

He can’t go home, of course.

Instead, he assigns himself the duty of attending to Menelaus, hoping that brushing down forelegs and picking off field stickers will make him look less out-of-place. Hans has had a groom wash his favorite caparison—the bloody-antlered stag of war that Henry hates so much because he cannot look at it and not think of him strung up on a Cuman pole, head lolled forward, dripping blood from his lip.

It did not strike the same kind of fear in Henry then as it does now. Then he did not even know he loved Hans. Now he hears spit splatter upon the leaves in his memory and fears Hans, too, will enter his red dreams. 

“What do you mean _fucked up_? Fucked-how.”

“Wiggly. Like a loose tooth.”

“I thought Sir Bernard asked you to see the armorer.”

“ _Yes_ , well,” Hans snaps at him, swings his leg recklessly over the saddle, and lets his bootheels hit the dirt.

Henry’s already talked to him too much. Hans thinks he’s stupid for worrying about appearances— _the appearance of propriety_ , he snorts, _is as worthless as it is_ _extinct_ —and Henry supposes he’s right. But this feels different from swigging mead at Traders’ Tavern. It feels different from hiding in the library, too, or from sitting on some pasture fence to smile at pretty girls and eat soft cheese. Being among soldiers—with Hans all gussied up in his plate, glistening like a newly-quenched blade—makes him feel as though he oughtn’t be seen even standing in the young lord’s shadow.

“Pike it, blacksmith,” Hans growls over the back of his warhorse, even though Henry hasn’t said a word. But under the disdain is a flare of tenderness that still shocks him, sometimes. “You’re as handsome as Theseus in that armor and you ruin it by brooding about old men.”

Henry knows it isn’t true, but with Hans looking at him like so, he almost feels like it is.

Bernard’s call interrupts them. Hans rolls a shoulder beneath his fucked-up armor and stalks away from Henry to argue about strategy; Jaroslav tells Janek a dirty joke as they lug water back toward camp; Ruda sits on a stump and tucks a little wrapped parcel of salami back into his purse. Henry can’t seem to listen to any one thing. He lingers by the horses, unbuckling Menelaus’s saddle as he drifts in and out. He listens to the river buzzing with new bugs and the chop of Hans’s complaining over and above it all.

Above all, it feels disconcerting to be here and unable to be too near to him. Henry doesn’t want to be in this secret place with a bunch of men. He wants to flop across the baby grass and drink moonshine Hans hid somewhere underground a long time ago and dug up with his bare fingers. He wants to eat salted bacon because they’re too rotten at hunting to catch anything fresh. He wants to kiss until their mouths get too sore to keep on, and make love, too—not in the armory lockup in a hurry with rondels and things jabbing them in the sides, and not half-drowning in a cramped bath with the pretense of a woman between, neither—but until they are good and finished and couldn’t give a damn about the world. Looking at Hans laugh meanly there with the tree-mottled sun in his armor, Henry thinks of his first time inside him, a memory that makes his face hot and his heart feel fatty and his head stupid.

 _I don’t understand why you think so_ , he says to his captain. He says _if you’re so sure it’s trickery, you ought to be able to prove your hunch._ He says _then explain it to me!_

Henry drapes the saddle over the bleached fence and hurries away, sitting himself on a log by the unlit fire, where he can drink water and not look at Lord Capon cawing under the big oak tree anymore.

 _Good!_ Hans caws, though it’s more showmanship than real goodness. _Then you can make the rotation decisions and you won’t need to worry me about it, will you?_

It’s not much respite. Henry looks up just in time to see Hans has abandoned Bernard and is intent on joining his men around the pit, too. He steps over the log, clumsily wide-legged in battle spurs, and—plain as day—plunks his merry arse down next to some village blacksmith to take them off. He is much closer than is prudent, and knocks their armored knees together as though to cheer him up. As though to punish him for sulking. As though no one in their right mind would notice.

Henry notices. He has to tighten both arms to his sides to stymie how terribly they want to find some place to touch him beneath his loose metal pieces. If he laid his cheek on Hans’s steel chest, it would burn.

Bernard is here now. He orders them to listen. And Henry knows he should listen, and he’d like to—but he cannot seem to do it.

He thinks of running up the Pirkstein stairs soaked with rainwater and woods-ragged and giggling like little girls, bird-brained from the newness of everything, mouth stinging from Hans’s too rough kisses, forgetting to be afraid of the leftover storm. He remembers knowing exactly what would happen—how Hans would kiss him again, too hard again, one second after the clack of the bedroom lock, pushing him back against the door and neglecting the barren fireplace, and they’d strip their heavy wet clothes every which way, and there wasn’t even any need to be skittish because they had already seen each other’s nakedness plenty. He remembers how Hans pulled him ridiculously onto the floor even through the nicely made-up bed was right there, and he asked if Henry knew what he was doing, if he’d ever had a man before, and Henry said _sort of, no but I’ve, not like you_ —and how Hans took care of everything after that, but not quite everything, because then it would have been too easy, and he wanted to know how much Henry really wanted him or not. How he had popped something glass to address their issue quickly and then immediately dropped and spilled it fuck-all on the floor beside them with a clank. How Henry had watched mutely as his heart crackled like griddle apples, seemed sticky as cotton. How, in that moment, he had felt so strongly it made him afraid, before he remembered it was just Hans and so what was there to be afraid of.

He’d said _oh, come on, Hal; don’t lie there trembling like a wet horse; relax a little, will you; it’s all right_.

In the camp, among the soldiers, Bernard’s still ordering this and ordering that. Henry feels sure he’s missing something important—something he’ll be yelled-at over later—but hearing the captain bark over the hawthorns is making him awfully glum, and Hans thinks his pestering makes it less intolerable, but really it’s making things worse. He fiddles with something just out of sight, and Henry almost nudges him to knock it off, but doesn’t manage in time.

Hans pulls a little paper-wrapped thing out of his coin purse and unfolds it. He pops one tiny copper in his mouth and another right in the middle of Henry’s palm. It’s not a copper; it’s honey candy, melting gently in the crease of his hand. Henry eats it quick before it gets sticky and before anybody sees.

In his daydream, in Pirkstein, Hans had sat in his lap and barked with laughter. He’d pinched Henry hard in the stomach to keep him from beaching himself. He’d said _I knew it, I fucking knew you’d make that God-awful face—_

He remembers it being like a memory—like something that had already happened to him. He remembers saying oh my God. He remembers running his palms up Hans’s knees and through the fine hair on his leg and burning up like old paper. He remembers snatching Hans’s arms and pulling Hans down and turning them over, mad as a March hare. He remembers how Hans laughed spittily in surprise and had to knuckle the saliva off his mouth. How he hooked his leg over Henry’s hip, which had to be the best feeling there is, and he petted his chest and told him how they were really and truly better friends than anyone else had ever been in the history of the whole world, really and honestly, which is something Hans felt the need to say a lot. And then it was just their shaky breathing and the whistly old castle and the distant thunder that had already passed them by, and the gray sky through the window that was the same color as Hans’s eyes. And Henry remembered in those moments wanting to tell him something, too. Maybe he wanted to tell Hans he didn’t know anything about friendship. Maybe that all his dreams these days were either blood red or about them sleeping under a tree. Maybe Henry would have liked to tell him that, after Skalitz, he had forgotten how to feel every feeling there is—not the grit of hunger nor the salt foam of grief nor the balm of daylight. He hadn’t felt another thing until Hans appeared in front of him one day, bright and sharp like a fishing-bird, acting as though God stuck him on Earth solely to make a blacksmith steam with anger and laugh himself silly and play in the sun—before he even knew Hans—before he knew it was just Hans.

But nothing he could think of made any sense. And he accidentally elbowed the spilled glass bottle across the ground until it clanked hard into the locked door, making them both wince. And the storm had crept inside the window glass to turn the young lord’s wall dark, and neither of them had bothered to light a fire, and the carpet was getting wet with their already wet clothes, and the painted black stag leapt for its life as dusk rolled slowly in. And he almost said _I can’t believe this happened to me_ before he remembered it was only stupid old Hans, so Henry didn’t say anything.

He gave himself up for good. He learned what it felt like to be the person who made Hans surrender—how his fine lordly face flushed up like some jilted maid had hit him in the nose with a brushful of rouge; how his brow worried so much you’d want to kiss it more than anything; how he hissed like a weasel so distinctly it almost made Henry laugh—or it would have—had he not also learned a second later how it felt to lose himself into Hans—how the spike hit him right in the guts, shaking out a wet hiccup and an embarrassing yawp—how it twisted then broke apart into a hundred bright and sparkling pieces, destroying him with giddiness, spattering the underside of his brain with the pleasure and absurdity of what they’d done; how it left him hoarse and wobbly with relief.

He remembers lying still afterwards, placid with shock, catching enough breath to ask _is it always going to be like that_ , and he remembers the almost-sadness with which Hans gently smoothed his hair and said _no, blacksmith. It’s never been like that before_.

In the hunting camp, under the oak tree, Hans impatiently crunches the candy in his mouth, breaking it. And Henry wants it to be just like that again so badly, he bites the tender inside of his own cheek.

It can’t be, of course. So he does not try to escape. He does as Hans teaches him; he wedges the piece of candy under his tongue and lets it dissolve there, as if the taste of honey can distract him from who he is and all that has happened to him.

And maybe—a little—it does.

The woods get darker. Later, they all close their eyes, and in armor, they sleep.

* * *

_In the old days, when Henry dreamt of horses, it was always little flounces of color, grazing faraway on a blooming hill._

_Normal horse-colors: sandy golds and noble blues and bays the texture of slick river soil. Nonsense horse-colors: diamond manes and mares as green as unripe gooseberry shells, little amber foals and stallions as dark and fat as raisins. They all mingled together, like family, in his dream._

_There is only one color of horse Henry dreams about now._

_He dreams of red horses on a red grass hill._

_He dreams of red hooves and red teeth thrashing in deep red mud._

_He dreams of red horse necks breaking like long red stems and spilling red juice into a red river._

_He dreams of red crosses burning up above the Rovna churchyard in clouds of red smoke._

_He dreams of red rain soaking Ma’s dress._

_He dreams of red hands tearing Lord Capon off his big red horse. He dreams of red banners clapping. He dreams of Hans’s bright voice screaming raw red screams as they hold him to the ground and saw his bloody antlers off into the little red leaves._

* * *

Henry wakes with a start. His body jerks before his eyes open. Something solid has thumped in the dirt too close to his face and scattered the red pools like fishes.

It’s a stone.

His eyes struggle to focus and refocus in the sudden wreckage of lost sleep. His head is cradled in the uncomfortable safety of his bascinet, calves encased in iron. A last red leaf blows away in the cricketing forest night.

There are two or three other stones, too, freshly landed in the earth around his face, each one closer and closer than the one before. He follows their trail with his eyes toward the gently roaring fire.

Across it, Hans—antlerless—lies on his blanket with eyes half-opened and unsmiling, staring at him intently. There’s another little rock already poised in his fingers, ready to toss.

Henry doesn’t move. For a moment—waking in this camp surrounded by snoring soldiers, to Hans bronzed by the trance of burning cedar and with his own head only half-full of precious sleep—he feels arrested. He truly can’t think of anything else he ought to do but look at him. Before a different answer arrives, Hans sits up, breaking his gaze and never looking back. Henry watches his boots gingerly circle the pit and walk away, onto the gravel, away from him.

“Bernard,” he calls, sounding short and flippant as a real birdie. “I’m going to take a piss.”

The captain grumbles something discouraging, but Hans is already picking his blasé way up the dark dirt road and into the brush. He walks out of the campfire glow, its red fading from all his golds, until the night has subsumed him entirely. Henry lies still on his itchy pallet of leaves and waits and waits, listening to the wood snap and the nightbirds coo.

When enough time has passed for it not to be suspicious—that’s the lie, anyway—he rolls out of bed, dusts the pine needles off his elbows, and walks towards the river for a piss, too.

He circles around upstream. He knows Hans will be waiting in his favorite hunting spot: the lumpy hare warrens that grow under purple butterworts and click beetles and old alder trees. It’s a short hike, but made harder in the dark, and Henry trips up the hill with no path to ease the way.

He’s a little afraid Hans will apparate from the darkness and pounce him. But he doesn’t. Instead, he finds Lord Capon standing beneath a cluster of rowanberry trees just beside the Talmberg trail, fiddling with his hunting knife and looking ever-so-often into the blackest part of the moonlit glade, as if he can see any better than the soldiers can.

“What are you doing,” Henry gripes, crunching over the new ferns and ducking a low-hanging vine. It’s too early for berries, but the white flowers are starting to explode; he mistakes a falling blossom for a bug and swats it hard against his maille collar.

“What does it look like?” Hans ho-hums back. He’s whittling a stick into a sharper stick, Henry can see, but putting no effort into doing it well. And he’s not very stealthy in that plate of his, and the moon sparks his plackart like a faulty candlewick, but it’s too dangerous to strip it before sleep. “I’m taking a piss.”

Henry snorts. A horned owl patters through an ash tree and across the path ahead of them. All men afield are supposed to watch the road, pissbreak or not—garrison rules—but Hans isn’t watching a damned thing; he’s swiping his knife clean in the elbow of his gambeson. Henry begins to suspect he lied just to get away from Bernard a while. Still, they squint at the big daft bird until it settles in a branch, and the forest is quiet again.

Except for Hans himself, of course. His bright eyes narrow above moonstruck steel. They’re a touch too keen, those eyes—sharp always, but sharper when he’s thinking—and Henry can’t help but feel a little hunted.

“What’re you about, tossing rocks at people,” he grouses, because he can’t think of anything else, and shuffles closer to him. Hans idles there under the bloomed rowan and scalps the twig.

“I didn’t toss rocks at _people_. I tossed them at you, blacksmith’s boy.”

“You’ll get tossed into a grave! It’s a little insane, don’t you think.” He waits for Hans to look ashamed. “In front of Bernard’s company. Those two pikemen are old friends of mine. It doesn’t strike you as improper?”

His Lordship doesn’t seem sorry, though—not even a lick. He flicks some bark off his knife like someone’s awfullest son, then flings his half-whittled stick into the raspberry bushes. Henry’s sure, somehow, he’s not contrite.

“Improper.” Hans laugh-snorts. He stoops to rummage for another stick, but doesn’t find a good one, and so stands back up. “As though your royal hetman doesn’t scuttle back to Nový Hrad every summer and fuck the king himself.”

“Bah. That can’t be true.”

“You’re sure! What do you think snared a Kobyla rights to Charles’s precious mines in the first place? A petty-noble sitting on a pile of Holy Roman silver isn’t improper enough for you? Do you think our Wenceslaus was roused by your lord’s incessant moral philosophizing?”

Henry snorts again, swinging an arm just to drop it. But this only makes Hans’s gaze tighten another notch, as if he’s staring down a deer, watching it tail-flag, waiting for the right moment to leap out of the sedges and snatch its throat.

“Do you reckon His Majesty is a history devotee?” he presses. “Do suppose he just handed over the richest land deed in Bohemia in admiration of our Sir Radzig’s compelling…” Hans lets the iron poker get nice and steamy before really jabbing it in. “…prominence?”

“Ah, bullshit. That’s a horsefeather if I’ve ever heard one. That’s a load.”

“You’ve got that right, blacksmith. It’s a load, to be sure. Probably several—it is springtime, after all.”

“You’re vile. You’re fucking vile. God, I hate talking to you.”

“At least,” he laughs, and laughs again when Henry swats his armored rear. It makes a dull metal ding, and Hans quits jackrabbiting long enough to give his knife a last chipper wave-about, scattering moonlight, then slides it tersely back into its sheath. “At least I’m not a crown-fucker! Thank Christ for these popes fucking up my manorial debut. Elsewise, I might’ve had to bounce my own balls to Nový Hrad and pay the lordly tax.”

Henry looks a little stunned. He hasn’t cavorted with nobles long enough to tell if the joke is serious or not.

“Anyway, what do you care?” Hans scolds him with a jerk of his chin and a sneer. But his eyes are softer than before, and Henry can tell he wants to kiss him. “I’m not trying to give you my silver, you chicken.”

It’s still plenty dark out, and the sun’s deep in a pleasant dream, and wispy blue clouds blot the stars. Eventually, they’ll return to Captain Bernard and the soldiers strewn around their fire. Eventually, they’ll leave this pocket of Hans Capon’s woods. Eventually, they will have to lie down and sleep.

“Well,” Henry sasses properly, crossing his arms. “Why am I wasting my time with you, then? I’ll have to go off and find myself some lord who isn’t such a cheapskate.”

“Ha! You really have been listening to Radzig. I’d ask for your thoughts on tomorrow’s ambush if I believed you could sneak fifteen steps without kicking over a bucket of horseshoes.”

“Me! You’re the one spent all night hoarking like a wild dog with a fishbone in his throat, didn’t you. Hissing a cat with a stuck hair ball.”

“That’s a fucking story,” Hans hisses, so Henry has no choice but to demonstrate. Those gray eyes grow thinner and thinner until he shushes the blacksmith with a horseman’s _ssst!_ and an embarrassed flick of his hand.

“A horror story,” Henry agrees, drying his mouth on his knuckles. Hans beholds him sourly. “All that noising’s like to terrify poor Nightingale. Scared me, too. Say, there’s an idea: Maybe you should just sneak up on von Kamberg’s camp and yank your pizzle. That’ll send the Bavarian sprinting back to Oleshnitz for sure.”

“You had better suck your tongue in, boy.”

“Just what I tried to tell you last night.”

That does it. But Henry knows what he’s about, and is ready to run.

Ready or not, Hans lights off after him in the darkness. They go scrambling through the sapling birches, steel punches peppering the back of Henry’s brigandine, undergrowth popping beneath their boots. The woods are black and scattered with silver mint leaves, and it’s hard to move when you can’t see the ground. And for all his lip, Henry knows the young lord could run him down in two shakes if he really wanted; he’s longer-legged, twice as fast, and he knows the spaces between these trees like a stag does.

But sometimes winning spoils your fun. Instead, Hans lands two or three last blows before they both come panting to a stop. The disrupted forest bobs and shivers behind them. Henry props his palms on his knees to recover and, once he has, they clomp back—first to the road, then back to the alder warrens where Good Lord Birdie famously hunts his fattest hares and it’s easy to walk. One last pop of a gauntleted fist in his side seals the truce and they plunk down on the grass side-by-side.

“I only want you to know: If I wasn’t wearing this, I’d have clobbered you,” Hans swears, a little winded, slapping his own metal breast. “Just so. I’d have you arse-planted in the dirt and I’d bloody your snotty peasant nose.”

A blanket of molted leaves has smothered the grass between these skinny trees and made the earth dangerously soft. Someone will be looking for Lord Capon soon, Henry reckons. No one will come looking for him.

“You think you’re safe,” Hans adds, sidelong, bending a knee just to prop his elbow upon it. He watches Henry flop uselessly onto his back. “You’re not. I let you live. You’re just lucky the captain’s men are about, or I’d carry you off into the woods somewhere and fin‘amor you until you started speaking French.”

“Oh?”

“I might.”

“ _Oh_?”

“You think I won’t?”

Henry lifts his head off the leaves, leveling him with a snobbish look, but doesn’t budge. “Go ahead,” he says. “Carry me off. I’d like to see you try it.”

Hans sizes him up only for a second to chart his course of attack. Then he’s all business—up on his feet, circling, and diving in to push him until he’s sitting proper. Henry goes to dead weight just to be troublesome and laughs and laughs. But his laughter is interrupted when he’s suddenly hooked under the arms and hauled straight up, squeezing a breath out of him. And then Hans—who is stronger than it looks like he would be—ducks under his ribs and scoops him right off the ground, catching him under the knees, balancing Henry’s whole self across his shoulders like a sawn log until his feet are dangling and his face is red as appleskin.

 _You fucking goose,_ he squawks, and Hans is struggling too much to sass him, but puffs a dry-lipped _hah!_ Henry says put me down, you stupid fucking—

Hans doesn’t put him down. He wobbles a few steps forward, and Henry can’t help but choke with the funniness of it all until his nose runs.

They don’t make it twenty paces before they crash. It’s not the forest, but the road that does Hans in; he trips on a root and lurches forward, spilling Henry everywhere. The blacksmith goes tumbling overhead and across the path, landing in the blasted roses. Hans is stretched chin-first across packed earth like a cat hit by a wagon, and even though Henry’s covered in rose bites and smashed raspberries, he scrambles out to see the damage.

Before he can even ask if His Lordship is all right, Hans picks his cheek up off the road, spits out a mouthful of dirt, and rasps, “So don’t you ever tell me—don’t you tell ME I can’t pick your fat arse up and throw you any time I fucking like—!”

Maybe the curse of being morons is always winding up right where you started. They crawl back out of the road and into the beeches, sore and wheezing with their own idiocy, then collapse like shipwreck survivors. Henry wets his thumb to scrub soil off the young lord’s face, and Hans pulls a vine out of the blacksmith’s mussed hair, and barons are forgotten entirely. They giggle stupidly until Henry, going fuzzy-eyed over watching Hans titter in the leaves, kisses him. His eyes turn as cavernous as silver mines in the dark, and there’s berry juice bruising his brigandine, and he can feel his heart behind his front teeth. And though they’re on stolen time, Hans kisses him back like he’s trying to taste it, because even in a breast of Milanese steel, he’s still and always just Hans, who really would lick your heart if he could. Who snorts when he laughs too hard, and who sometimes laughs so riotously he has to lie down on the floor and let tears roll down his face. Who could make you forget anything for a little while, no matter how bad or how red or unbearable. Who tells him disgusting jokes; who smells like sun on river water and has a birthmark on his right arse cheek; who calls him _chicken_ in such a way it gently boils him alive, and whose mouth tastes like thick red wine and deer blood and honey candy.

“Do you want silver, you hen?” he wonders, cupping Henry’s chin to kiss the crease where his top lip meets his cheek, and then the lid of his eye. “I’ll dress you in a whole suit of silver, if you like. I’ll strip you bare as a baby in the woods and you can wear the moon for armor. We’ll run around like the first of the Romans.”

“Are you actually fucking stupid? I’m wearing iron, you git,” he chuffs back, slapping a metal cuisse to prove it. But he lets Hans kiss him again, anyway, first on the eyebrow and then so gently on the corner of his mouth that Henry has to cough to cover up his own bashfulness.

“I’ll decivilize you,” Hans assures him, pawing at the buckles on Henry’s thigh like he can do anything about it. “We’ll grow dog teeth and shed our skins and eat fish right out of the river raw.”

“You’re rot at this. That’s the worst seduction I’ve ever heard in my life.”

“I bet you’re lying.”

“You go on and strip naked and run cock-out around the woods. Run right up on Wolflin’s camp with a trout flopping in your mouth. Tell him you’ve got a moon-plated arse.”

“You’ll forget houses and coin and armies and silver, and everything you know about blacksmithing, too. And we’ll never go back,” he swears. And even if the young lord’s eyes are sharp and even if he loves the woods in all the ways he thinks he does, he is still Hans, and Hans loves Henry more. “We’ll forget the rules of civilized people. We’ll forget all the important things. We’ll forget language itself. We’ll get so fucking lost, no one will remember we ever had names.”

And Henry does forget. Just now, for a while. He forgets Wolflin and Ruda and Radzig and the rest. He forgets Rattay and Oleshnitz and his rotten little bailey room, too. He even forgets, with Hans’s perfume in his nose and Hans’s big teeth threatening to mince the large neck muscle just under his jaw, about the smell of ash over Skalitz.

He’s forgotten the forest, too. He doesn’t remember the baron, or the loose strap on Hans’s armor, or the way sabatons _whish_ when they creep through new leaves.

He does not hear the bushes pushed apart.

The captain is there, suddenly. It’s Bernard, and he steps out of the night and overgrown roses, into the road to search for his master. Henry recognizes the thin call of _Sir Hans?_ before his eyes can make sense of their garrison colors in the dark. He sucks air too sharply with Hans’s teeth in his throat and flips him off and into the short grass like a broken pancake.

It’s not soon enough. Captain Bernard looks embarrassed. He averts his eyes immediately, then coughs, and then—tight-lipped like a man with a bee bite he’s trying not to scratch—he sternly gestures them to their feet. They stand up. The young lord glows red over his steel shell with desire that is quickly unthreading. For his own part, Henry wishes he would just be struck by lightning.

He has to say something, of course. He always has. So, standing there in his grass-stained brigandine with dirt on his padded arse, Henry looks left. He looks right. He looks in just about every direction that does not hold a mortified captain—who is, in turn, doing his best job not to look at either one of them.

“No,” Henry reports, croaking it, “bandits on this road, sir.”

Bernard stops him. He jabs a thumb over his shoulder, pointing through the rowans their fool-hearted chase just wrecked, towards camp. He about-faces to lead the way, helm shining like a beacon, and that’s all.

They hang there in his wake, struck stupid as some broken bushes, too.

Henry looks to Hans mutely for help—pleading that, as his rightful knight-master (and as his senior by some matter of months), Lord Capon will say something clever to save them. But Lord Capon just closes his eyes, mightily puffs out his cheeks, and rolls his head back on his neck, letting it hang there as if to invite one of the beeches to topple over and crush him dead on the road.

When it doesn’t, he slaps his long hands over his long chin, drags his face back up, and then lunges out of the trees to follow Bernard.

And so Henry follows, too.

They return to the camp and sleep with the fire between them, recivilized.

**IV.**

_To His Esteemed Lordship Sir Hans Capon of Rattay  
_ _courtesy of my Dear Cousin Bernard  
_ _or Whomever Else His Lordship’s personal correspondence may concern  
_ _from his gracious guest Sir Wolflin of Kamberg  
_ _(rightfully Oleshnitz by blood and by law)_

_Dear Sir(s),_ _  
_

_It is a joy beyond joy to welcome you to my humble campsite. But I fear you’ve missed the mark by about a mile and a half._

_I had thought that surely one of my cousin’s able scouts would stumble across us by accident, if nothing else. But the hours are whittling by and my men grow awfully tired of eating stringy Czech hares. So, with God’s permission: I took a little initiative._

_(No offense meant to Lord Capon—whose tracking skills, I understand, are second to no other Bohemian. I am pleased to inform His Lordship that he did get very close. Please relay my personal compliments to the young lord: Minus a distraction or two, I am sure you would have found it.)_

_However._

_As I know Sir Hans is infamously busy with matters of government, I imagine it would be better not to wait for you to find us, and instead extend our hand to you. Hence, I have sent you my man with this letter, with good will, and with instructions to lead your people to suitable parley grounds._

_Alas, we are short on chairs, so I must insist on entertaining a party of no more than ten for you and ten for me. Regrets to the Rattayfolk left behind, but I am sure the young lord will bring along his closest friends._

_I trust this arrangement is to His Lordship’s satisfaction and anticipate our meeting with great interest._

_Until then, I remain,_

_YOUR GUEST,_

_SIR WOLFLIN VON KAMBERG_

* * *

Morning arrives before sunlight. Cold dew makes the rose leaves sparkle like minnows, and fresh toadstools make an old forest smell new.

It is Janek who wakes Henry again. He snorts up from his pallet of leaves as Ruda tosses a pail over the campfire. He feels as though he is always the last one awake.

A messenger has appeared in the smallest hours. Bernard, suspicious of his cousin’s trickery, ropes Wolflin’s unlucky sod to the hitching post while the Men of Rattay plan their next move. But a blacksmith is no use at strategy or politics; as for Henry, he wanders downhill toward the creek, yawning among the rabbit ferns and the blue thistle, where Lord Capon practices war all alone.

Hans looks unhappy in the way of a little bull who has just caught a glimpse of the massive steer next-door. His face is tense, and Jan Ješek’s blade cleaves the cool air with excessive precision. Henry approaches carefully, mindful of the arc of his swing.

“All right?” he asks, losing the _sir_. Janek and Jaroslav are just far enough uphill not to listen-in, and Bernard is far too busy nail-biting about imagined family treachery to bother corralling them again.

Hans does not answer right away. He fires a glare over pauldron, bruise-lidded and red-hot. Neither of them have slept enough. The next swing misaligns that loose strap, and for a moment, Henry worries he’s broken it.

“Fucking giddy,” Hans steams, finally, and looks away again, hawk-eying the point of his sword. Nothing is broken. “I’m about to trot into an enemy encampment and cross cocks with a fucking fishlord. Why wouldn’t I be jumping for joy?”

He raises the blade in _oberhau_ , gauntlets creaking, choking the grip. And, not-quite-perfect-enough, he clefts the skull of an invisible Wolflin. Hans’s strike is quick and strong. But its violence makes it unsteady, like a colt pulling too hard at its bit, so keen to get where it’s going that it loses its race on the way.

 _“_ On your guard, turnip farmer!” he snaps a moment latter, shattering the tension. He stamps his foot into the wildflowers, and Henry knows what the young lord wants well enough. “Stop flapping your jaw at me and let’s have a bout.”

It’s only a bit of rehearsal. Hans wants to practice his _posta di falcone_ and his pissy little back-of-the-knee kicks, and Henry surrenders to the forest dirt and the sure slick of sweat inside his drab brigandine. He loses the lingering scent of salt and lavender from yestermorning’s bath. He lets Hans throw him to the ferny soil and butt him in the belly and slap his arms around.

If you can imagine: Henry doesn’t particularly enjoy sparring with His Lordship.

It occurs to him—somewhere between being kneecapped for the dozenth time and getting spanked on the underchin by the flat of a sword—that Hans isn’t having any fun, either. He’s all advance and no _en guard_ ; Henry is whipped through the thin trees before he can dream of a counter; yet Hans doesn’t gloat at all. Instead, he scowls under the morning sun and punches sourly at his own breast and says nothing. Again and again, he attacks the poor blacksmith with an excess of fire, and the clamor of metal smashes the spring air, and his polished heels root stubbornly into the earth.

An _oberhau_ , a _mittlehau_ and Henry’s had about enough. He glares up from the dirt—first at the blade tip, thrust rudely right up to his throat apple, and then at the lord. And then he smacks Jan Ješek’s sword out of his face with the back of his hand so hard, Hans’s gauntleted wrist twists outward.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Henry barks, then grabs for his neck with a clumsy glove. The weight of his own hand is a comfort. He scrapes earthy grittle off his tongue with his teeth and turns a cheek to spit it out. “I ought to knock your smile in.”

Hans sneers at him. He clucks once against the roof of his mouth, then sticks the sword in the direction of Henry’s nose and gives it a little stir. “Gird up, pussycat. I haven’t cut you once.”

“Because I jumped the fuck out of the way! Trying to cleft my chin. Trying to snap my fucking shin in two.”

“Bawk, screech, you hen. I didn’t kick you that hard,” Hans scolds, eyeing him sidelong. But his sword hangs sullenly at the reach of his arm, and his usual pluck wilts, and if you looked very closely at the shadowy place where the bowsprit of his mouth nudges into his cheek, you might find the tiniest cutlet of shame.

Henry slaps crossly at Hans’s hand when it’s first offered, but relents the second, and lets the young lord haul him to his feet. He doesn’t apologize, but holds out his flask out and dandles it. Henry glowers and sweats down his nose and snatches it away.

One might, if they knew hot-blooded Birdie, mistake his choleric look for anger. But Henry—who knows Hans better—guesses it has less to do with wrath than fear.

“Wolflin’s carrier brought another message. He—wrote something odd.” The hot coal of Hans’s glare has nowhere to go; lacking any robber-barons to broil alive, he sears the loose horses grazing on the camp hill. He lets Henry finish all their drinking water and, still pink-cheeked with aggression, sheaths his father’s sword. “All land-vultures are full of shit, obviously. But it fucking perplexed me. You know what he said? He said I came very close to finding their stinking camp.”

“Bah. You can’t be perplexed by that. I reckon he’s just trying to scare you.”

“That’s just it, Hal. Because he wrote something yesterday, too. That freakish little Bavarian block-warmer said, and here I quote, some nonsense about my _interest in ironworks_.” He snorts. It’s a wonder poor Pebbles doesn’t combust across the old straw and pink milkwort, Hans is scowling so, and before Henry can manage a wild look back, those fierce eyes turn upon him. “What the fuck do you suppose he means by that?”

“You don’t think they got ahold of my letters—?”

“Don’t be stupid.” Hans strikes it down immediately, punitively. Like if he says _no_ with a strong enough voice, it will enforce his will upon both his worlds—the one of gray castles and the one of red pines. “No one’s going to read your fucking letters, blacksmith. They’re six feet each.”

“What did Hanush have to say?”

“I doubt Uncle even noticed. He’s still fuming, I’m sure. I thought we were going to have to loop a feed sack behind his ears and stuff it full of gin.”

“Hmm.”

“ _Hmm_ ,” Hans mocks him, awfully pissy about it, turns his back, and unsheathes his sword to swing again—alone. “Maybe I should stuff your head in a fucking bag, too.”

His strike shreds air. Henry hears its heavy whistle and he can’t help it; he imagines himself catching the blow. He imagines spilling his eye out and dying easily. For some reason, he imagines Sir Wolflin—just as easily—stepping aside.

“Now that you mention,” he murmurs, listening as Hans hunkers for another swing, watching his make-believe self bleed out on the delicately rotting leaves. “You do seem a little less than rosy about the whole thing.”

“Well. Maybe if you weren’t being such a massive tit, I’d feel rosier.”

“Me! What did I do?”

Hans pushes a stony breath out through his nose, lowering the sword. His blink is a little too long, and his taut voice is a sliver softer, but nothing will relax his shoulders. Nothing will scour off the embarrassment leftover from last night’s indiscretion. Nothing will ease his fear of losing this fight—of floundering yet again in front of everyone who is meant to respect him—of being an embarrassment in his skin. Worst of all, nothing will erase the awful new knowledge that there truly is no wild place on Earth where he is not, somehow, still a lord.

“You didn’t do anything, Hal,” he says, and means it, even though it doesn’t help. “I’m strolling into a fight and I’d just like to get in and have it done with. All right?”

Henry looks toward the creek, stomach growling awkwardly in the silence. There is no freedom with everyone here, and so there is no breakfast, either. There’s no creek fish Hans skewered with a sharp stick and thrust into fire until the skin crisped and the oil dribbled clean; there is no splash of wake-up wine from Hans’s canteen to dull the sting of lingering overindulgences; there is no option of dashing the hunt and forgetting their fight and going back to sleep.

“All right,” Henry says, and means it, even though he knows it’s not.

Hans sheathes the weapon for good this time, glancing toward the ring of tents for his captain. The peeved messenger wriggles his sore arms around the post, and Janek paces anxiously while his little brother retrieves firewood, and Pebbles gradually chews the fence to woodchips. When he looks back to Henry, ready to talk for the first time today, it is still a bit askance with discomfort from the night before.

“Are you coming with me,” Hans wonders, playing blithe, as if the answer does not matter. He doesn’t do a very good job. “Or will you be staying with the billy goats at camp?”

Henry feels a mite offended, and scoffs. “Don’t be a cockhead about it.”

Hans makes himself grin through the fear. It’s like a grimacing dog, trying to be brave by showing its teeth, and Henry thinks that maybe—if he was very quick—it might be possible to take up his face and give him a kiss on the mouth.

He doesn’t, of course. Like this, they walk back to the camp, where Bernard is scolding soldiers, and where nobody wanders too far into the woods.

If Henry really is a hero: Wolflin is a titan.

He’s fought big men before. Killed them, too—each time in a crack-and-flash of temper and terror that made his head spin, left him sick on blood and as emptied as a silvermaid’s sieve. Felling a titan is always half-accident, Henry thinks. It’s half an act of God.

Except Wolflin is much bigger than Henry. Than the colossus from Skalitz who was brained in a church. Than Captain Bernard, his cousin, who hates him by name. And he’s bigger—by far—than little Lord Birdie, scowling up high on his rude horse, wearing a different dead Capon’s fucked-up steel.

Hans’s enemy does not ride at all, but stands afoot in the thorny clearing with a golden feather in his hat and a smile on. Wolflin von Kamberg waits while the Oleshna sturgeon flaps on a dusty old family banner behind him. He wears a black plush collar over a regal breast of blued metal, and his boots are battered by forest. But even caked in mud, they’re tall as a piper’s, and the keen face beneath its smart falconer’s brim looks calm. Cordial, even—as though, if you did not know him for a cousin-killer, you might mistake him for a well-heeled master huntsman. Or a baby burgrave’s most charming uncle. Or a Czech with a Bavarian accent and a voice that sounds, in these trees, like gravel on cold oil.

So the robber baron is.

The lawful baron, meanwhile, doesn’t utter so much as a hello. Hans dresses himself in a frown that harshens his brow and tries to be lordly; he tries to look older and grimmer and thicker through the neck; he tries to scrounge up a deeper voice. But he only manages to be louder, somehow. And he looks, to Henry, like a boy in comparison—one who is afraid of being switched across the face. Like someone whose loudness and scowl are the only things stopping him from slipping off his horse and retching up his breakfast on the leaves.

Wolflin von Kamberg is easily worth two or three Hans Capons. The veteran lord is twice a soldier, fifteen years older, and outweighs him once-and-a-half; he would demolish Jan Ješek’s yapping little spitfire as easily as flicking off an acorn top. Even that is understatement—he would mash him to gold-and-black Birdie paste and eat a thin spread of Czech lord across his toasted bread.

Henry prays to God Hans doesn’t try to fight him. He won’t even get started before he’s lost. 

It’s Wolflin who ends the silence. His scholarly face is at odds with a petulant tone, and as he speaks, he casually holds his belt, where a sword hilt shivers with pearls.

“What a welcome surprise,” the not-baron says, grin cocksure and crooked, bold enough to announce it to the forest. His eyes are unnerving and blue as glass. They do not pay Lord Capon a single respect, but lunge instead for Captain Bernard, who stands as stiffly as a coiled spring in the leaf-litter, waiting for a trap to snap shut. “My dear cousin!”

Henry has to knock his eyes off the prancing of Sir Wolflin’s cap feather. He’s brought two men too many, and worse, his second is an even heavier giant in a raven surcoat and a black-plumed sallet. The eyes beneath the half-drawn visor look yellow as bone in the untrustworthy forest light, and a trill of fear runs down Henry’s spine before he can oust it away.

Hans, too, looks from von Kamberg to the big fellow in black. And his stare seems, like a wolf in a snare, to constrict.

“I’m beside myself,” Wolflin goes on, finally, but his full throat is empty of joy. “Old Bernard, here at my beck. Grandfather’s will moves in mysterious ways. And it only took a land dispute to compel you to call upon your kin.”

Bernard, stony with dislike, says nothing. But as he waits for his cousin to greet his liege, the captain’s hand drifts across his pommel, too.

“This must, then, be Lord Rattay himself,” Wolflin decides, finally turning toward Hans, whose eyes flick back as derisively as his horse’s tail. Would-be-Lord Oleshnitz offers up a bow, but it’s shallow, and the flourish of his leading hand suggests it’s a bit of a joke. “A privilege to meet such a well-enfeoffed young man. At least someone’s son has to inherit something once or twice in this kingdom.”

Lord Rattay borrows his captain’s strategy. He sits upon Red Menelaus, sullen and silent as a templar’s portrait, making no move to dismount.

Wolflin’s smarmy tone betrays little, but those finely shaped brows give an unenthused hop. “I see we’re doing this the unfriendly way.”

“I don’t _parley nicely_ ”—the young lord dandles these words like a hard tweak on the nose. But in his attempt to start strong, he scowls himself five or six years younger, and the sass just makes him seem like a child—“with dogs who menace my subjects. You can walk away or not.”

Wolflin’s brow arcs higher. “Or not?”

“Or I’ll get off this horse,” Hans swears, “and I’ll slice your fucking cock off.”

A hush rustles through Rattay Wood. A martin lands messily in a crabapple tree, and a heavy leaf detaches, spinning impotently to the ground.

And then: a laugh.

It’s the big fellow in black. He doubles over and bursts. One loud, phlegmy choke, like he can’t help it. The sound is contagious—chuckles pimple across the Kamberg side. Bernard’s stiffness splinters into thin, silent panic. Hans flusters in the saddle, fire-eyed and embarrassed, livid at being laughed-off. Wolflin himself stands there under his pretty German hat with the pretty yellow pheasant feather and grins.

It’s a blistering mismatch. The interim is agonizing. The Men of Rattay grit their teeth in dismay.

As he watches Hans’s neck burn pink and clench, Henry can feel his blood in his fingers, pulsing around his garrison spear. Menelaus fusses, and the Capon stag of war seems to shiver on its caparison, and he cannot tear his eyes from the red stitches dribbling down its antlers. He wonders if his nose is going to bleed.

It’s Bernard who fumbles to intervene, tight-throated and desperate like a man chasing a string of linen that is getting away from him. “Your grievances are within our family,” he protests, taking an awkward step forward, just barely keeping himself from snatching His Lordship’s bridle and pulling him away. It’s a wild liberty for a captain to take, but old Bernard is willing to humiliate Hans in order to save his life. “Not with Sir Hanush, and not with—”

Wolflin’s grin mellows into a gracious, lashy smile, as if he’s being a graceful player by ignoring this challenge—and perhaps, indeed, he is. “Ungrit your teeth, Bernard. I’m not going to fight your young master.”

“You’ve no quarrel with the line of Leipa. It’s Milota you’re—”

“Don’t tell me whom I am and am not quarreling with, cousin,” Wolflin snaps. His chivalry shortens a notch, and the courtly smile evaporates. And he turns, like this, to address the lord he’s just disgraced. “Allow me to introduce my terms. They are blissfully simple.”

“We shall see,” Hans manages, enunciating crisply, sitting so straight it’s as if nothing in the whole world has ever bothered him. Clearly everything has.

“Release Sir Milota into my custody and I’ll return home. To my rightful ancestral home, which is all I ask for,” Wolflin insists, and inclines his head until he really does look knightly, and the tip of his long yellow feather bounces in the spring air. “And I’ll never so much as crinkle a leaf in your forest again.”

It’s some kind of mistake, Henry thinks—he’s never heard the name Milota, and were there an aggrieved lord lying up in Castle Pirkstein, surely Hans would have mentioned it to him. Impossible that he could keep such a thing secret. Impossible, too, that he might govern Rattay so significantly without caterwauling, at least a little. Mostly, though: impossible that he might have so much weighing upon his mind and shoulders and not tell Henry about it.

Until, of course, the proof:

“So you can slit his throat and dump him in the river?” A snort so thick and snotty hits the woodland air above his head that Henry, standing on-foot at Lord Capon’s side, almost mistakes his noising for the horse.

And so he realizes something new about orders, just then, standing there in the woods beyond Rattay, watching lords bicker over other lords. It is a knowledge that builds up like sediment at the back of his brain then rolls, rocky and uncomfortable, down his throat. And he realizes that perhaps there are some things Hans does not tell him. And he realizes that perhaps not all in the house of Pirkstein is exactly as he thought it was.

“Impossible,” he continues, as if he has snatched the word from Henry’s skull. As if that is that. “Sir Milota is my guest and your ‘terms’ accomplice me to the murder of a nobleman.”

“You have deeply confused my motives, young sir. I seek to liberate my cousin from where I am left to assume he has been confined.”

“Oh, is that what you call it? Will you liberate his head from his neck, too? Or just the balls from his sack?”

“If I were shielding the man who stole your birthright, I suspect you’d feel differently about lords’ business.”

“You’re not a lord, so no,” Hans says, and the contempt of it all volleys his eyebrows higher than they have ever been before. “I don’t suspect I would.”

“Thanks to Milota’s meddling. Any which way otherwise, I’d still hold my title and its honors. I wouldn’t have troubled your woods in the first place—”

The young lord’s scoff cuts the appeal in two. His temper makes his words stiff, like bad laundry; and Menelaus chortles rudely and paws up a flutter of leaves; and Hans corrects him too sharply with his heel. Henry winces at the dig of gold into horsebelly. He watches the bit roll angrily in the stallion’s mouth and dearly hopes Bold Lord Capon is not about get himself unhorsed in front of his enemy. He watches the clench of his gauntlets around the reins and puff of his shoulders beneath their pauldrons and he knows Hans is already afraid.

“You flayed that poor man within two inches of his life,” he bristles. “He had the skin hanging off him. Needled up like a little wife’s lacework. If you think I expect honor from you, you are fit to be sorely fucking disa—”

Wolflin cuts below the blow Hans is trying to make. He is as dismissive as ever, but—just on the underside of his sly look—there lingers something else, too.

“—thus leaving you, Your Lordship,” the baron promises, and a mean little secret twists in the snap and pop of these words against his teeth. A secret, Henry feels certain, they are both supposed to know. “—to go back to whatever it is you hunt here.”

His Lordship does not miss the thorny edge of that _whatever_. Neither does Henry. He cannot help but wonder if unwanted eyes upon his letters would leave a mark, somehow, or spoil the words, or poison whatever it was he meant to say.

Henry does not have to wonder long. Wolflin looks right at him.

He knows him by his face.

Henry cannot listen to anything suddenly. He looks away like a whipped serf. He hears his yesternight’s self crashing, laugh-stupid, in the dark through these same trees, being chased down like a two-legged deer. He holds his little spear tight as his stomach drags on his heart like an anchor on the end of a deep net, spiraling in the current, spasming with bloody fish.

“Come back with an army and knock up to my castle,” Hans’s voice threatens, breaking Henry’s trance. In that moment, polished-up upon his red horse with its fierce bit and cracking tail, he does not sound all bluster anymore. “You’ll get your teeth into Milota no other way.”

“Then—since you refuse to release my cousin—I’ll keep the entirety of my war chest as your compensation to me. Or I could return it as ransom paid in exchange for Milota’s freedom.”

“You’ll pay me with loot you plundered from my yeomen? Fuck off!”

The quiet that follows is volatile. The leaves patter with the last of Lord Capon’s outburst, and a squirrel breaks out of a bush to run. Bernard, too, breaks decorum one last time; he approaches his master’s steed to speak with him, shushing to-and-fro in the low, private tones of political advice. Henry cannot make any of it out. Henry’s blood is thrumming in his ears, and his mouth seems full of sand and grittle. But he notes the frown on Hans’s face as he listens, and notes how little His Lordship says in return.

They convene like that for minutes, each an age. Wolflin stands comfortably among his men, waiting, his face a portrait of low-lidded patience.

The conference doesn’t take long. Bernard steps away, leaving his master to squint at the threat who has encroached upon his woods.

“You may keep ten percent,” Hans dictates, “of what you stole. You will abandon the rest and flee this fiefdom or I’ll have you shot in the lungs—do you understand?”

Wolflin does. The portrait of patience has become a careful study in neutrality. He scrubs his chin, adjusts his smart hat, and he strolls—as if considering how much to bet on a game of dice—a few horse lengths across the leaves and back. “A paltry compensation for a cousin.”

“Do you think you can haggle with me? Twelve percent and I’ll let you keep your head.”

A final silence. Bernard seems to crane forward like an old hunting dog with his paw up. The big knight in black spits on the ground.

“It’s a shame,” Wolflin grants him, and as he sighs—and as his palm heel uncups his pommel—the golden feather gives its last salute. “But I suppose I should expect taking a loss in parley when I do it with friends of Radzig Kobyla. Perhaps you’ll trust us to divvy up our meager twelve percent?”

“I wouldn’t trust you to divvy a lamb chop, von Kamberg. But so be it. Bundle your loot and be off by sundown,” Hans bites, “or I’ll chase you out at the end of a halberd.”

Wolflin seems to rethink it for a moment longer. He drums his armored fingertips upon his thigh, glances up at the crabapple tree full of nut-brown songbirds and unripe fruit. Then the not-baron twists his chin to recount the men milling carefully around him: the archers staggered among the saplings; the third-and-fourth cousins of landgraves, all trussed up like bandits at war; his own cousin in another lord’s colors; the black knight with the passionless laugh and the honey-bee eyes. When he looks back, it is with another simple smile.

“I wish you well, young sir,” Sir Wolflin says, and tilts his head like a cat listening for birdsong, and graces him a final nod. “Truly. With your birthright and your bow-and-arrow.”

So he says.

And so—because Henry’s dreams are just dreams, even the red ones—it goes.

Hans does not fall from his red horse. The woods empty themselves of soldiers. And Henry, at last, goes home.

**V.**

It doesn’t rain on the trip back, but the fields are still wet, and the clouds blot the first-of-May sun. Sir Bernard sends Lord Capon out of the woods to find his uncle. Lord Capon brings Henry along.

Once Wolflin yanks his roots out of the soil, there’s a flurry of action. The captain designates a troupe to follow von Kamberg’s retreat at a distance; he-himself leaves with a scouting party to alert Rattay and secure the way for their governor. Hans picks Ruda as his personal guard—just to antagonize Henry, that much is sure—and they three cross quickly from the blanket of pines into pastureland.

It’s a quiet journey; the young lord is as prickly as a box of nails after his marginal victory, and the blacksmith simply has nothing to say that ought be said in mixed company. Instead: hooves on the dense dirt and a cool, sluggish breeze through the ash trees. Like this, morning evaporates into evening, and smoke rises from Mistress Zora’s forge on a distant hill.

They ride up the Neuhof Road without incident. Hans slows the horses as the Rattay wall peeks above its rocky gulch, far away but never as far as it seems. Closer, the Broken Wheel Inn clangs and cooks, and a smell of stewed wood cherries and seared trout almost reaches them. Henry wishes he could go there and sleep past noon tomorrow, except he knows he’d only have dreams.

“Gentlemen!” Hans proposes. His voice is yet too sharp and the dent won’t knock out of his brow, but he tries to force himself carefree again. “After all that fuckery, I suggest we stop to ensure the alehouse is still standing. What say you?”

No one says anything. Ruda and Henry sit in their saddles, sullen-faced, endeavoring not to be blasted into a glade.

“Well, not all at once, for fuck’s sake. Yes or no?"

“Aren’t you meant to report to Sir Hanush, my lord?”

“And you’re meant to be my page, blacksmith—not my fucking nursemaid. I’m thirsty. If you two are going to be old wives about it, you can plop your sour arses on a bench and watch me drink.”

So said, he gives the reins a slap, and they trot towards the tavern yard under a periwinkle sky.

He should not ask. He should not even bring it up—not with Ruda plodding heavily at his back, and not with Hans riding just fast enough to keep ahead. But Henry watches the slanted sun gleam upon his steel, different ever-so-gently from the way it was yesterday, and that barking dog of a voice makes him feel just slighted enough to pick a fight. Even if it must be a little one, waged sidelong.

Pebbles protests when Henry nudges him a few footfalls quicker—Menelaus always nips at him—but soon they are not so much behind as almost-beside. Hans regards him from the corner of his eye as though hoping for an insurrection, as if he wished Henry would grow just two or three more notches of spine.

So he does. He clears his throat as he’d seen Father do a hundred times when announcing well-deserved trouble on its way. And he says only, archedly: “Milota?”

“Oh,” Hans answers, pacified by surprise, as if he’d invited the rebellion but hadn’t been expecting it exactly this way. “What about him? He crawled up to Neuhof while you were out flipping stones for Radzig—all sloppy with dog bites, looked like someone had fed him into a tilt-hammer. Horrible! Worst thing I ever saw,” he crows. A swish of red horsetail punctuates his story as Menelaus warns Pebbles to obey Henry only at his peril. “Told us Wolflin brushed his elbow in Moravia. It went badly; the lout bullwhipped him up the cliff and across the border. He’s still lying up in the high castle. I hope he survives.”

“You might have said something.”

“What for?” Hans wonders. “You don’t know the Oleshnas from the popes.”

Henry’s patience flaps inside his chest like a thin flag. Something about the evening—with its clear, buttery sky and the sound of armor clacking above shod hooves—makes him a tad sick, as when you eat too little and stand up too fast. Something about the way Hans’s eyes face forward make Henry feel like a leaky cheesecloth, as though he is full of many tiny holes.

“I suppose not,” he relents, and this time, he does not forget the _sir_.

“Anyway, it’s done with. No use sulking about it,” Hans decides for him. With Ruda thunking along in the rear, how can Henry disagree?

It is a fair wind that stretches across the grass sea. The low sunlight warms them, chasing a damp chill off the fields and drying most of the mud. As they clop towards home and ale, Ruda silent as a grave with how much he detests this company, Hans still looks fit to snap the leg off a slow deer.

“Are you worried for Captain Bernard, my lord?”

“No, no,” he fobs. “I’m sure he’s fine.”

It’s only a bit bullshit. They round the remains of a mildewing old wagon before Hans calls overshoulder loud enough to be heard: “Ruda, do you remember Peter? Mean little blighter. Big yapping mouth.”

Ruda, who has hitherto been trying very hard not to be acknowledged, gives a safe reply. “I’m not certain, sir.”

“Well, it’s no loss,” Hans grants him, and promptly returns to paying all his attention to Henry, which—by the look of things—is no skin off Ruda’s arse. “That ox with Wolflin—the one in all black, with the cunny fur on his chin. That’s Sir Peter of Olomouc. He’s one of the von Vechta family knights; some baby lordling’s cousin-or-other; it hardly matters. I used to drink with him years ago, back when we were both chicken-necked shits.”

“So what does that mean?”

“It means, you terminal blockhead, that Wolflin’s had some success at rallying local noblemen to his cause. What the fuck are my peers doing pissing around with a marauding baron in the woods?”

“I’m not an expert, sir, but it appears they were marauding.”

“I’m just so happy you’re having fun,” Hans bitches. “Enjoying your outing to the countryside. Getting a little giggle in.”

“That’s the important thing.”

“What’s important,” the young lord corrects him, wrestling Menelaus’s thick red neck away before he can take a meaty chunk of Pebbles’s shoulder, “is making sure not a one of those bastards gets it into his head to stomp my woods apart the next time someone’s cousin snatches a shitty string of farmsteads off grandpa’s deathbed. I’ll have to talk to Uncle about bringing the lesser knights in-line. Knowing Hanush, he’ll probably want to trot out some stupid gesture of peace—a conference or a feast or…”

He trails off without finishing. A garrison rider trots briskly uproad through the tavern yard, swerving his horse around staggering patrons and loose chickens. He’s headed unmistakably toward them, and just like that, all hope of salvaging a drink evaporates from Hans’s mind.

 _Son of a whore_ , he spits, and the hoofbeats close in, and that’s all.

They don’t stop for a glass. Sir Hanush’s messenger collects Lord Capon from the wilds, and—dragging Ruda and Henry behind him like shot bucks—they are whisked off to the important things.

The sun is sinking like a half-capsized ship as they clatter into the courtyard. The stone is cool, and the hay in the lean-to smells earthy. Hans strolls right into High Castle Hall, all dirty and forest-rough in his ill-fitting armor, to detail his success. He leaves Henry and Ruda to see to the horses and wander off to their little homes.

It is an hour later when Henry himself is summoned. The town is drowsy in its last light before sleep; the daymarkets are all tucked away and the plaza fills instead with the rare squawk of Berthold’s awful birds and night insects. He washes quickly in his shaving bowl and laces the neck of his best shirt. And, like a good soldier, he goes.

Henry’s arrival interrupts the trio of squabbling nobles. Sir Hanush receives him merrily for it, waving the blacksmith into the hall of painted black family trees—though he is not, of course, invited to sit at the long table with Bernard or Lord Capon. The captain looks away from him with thin and immediate discomfort. Hans is too frustrated to smuggle him a secret face.

“I told you once,” the young lord presses, slapping his palm with a chop of the opposite hand. His gauntlets lie discarded on the table with an unrolled map and the platter of Hanush’s evening wine. The hall is dim as a mild sun sets behind gray and purple clouds, and Henry eases carefully into a discreet corner between the courtyard window and a locked cabinet, where he may be safely ignored until his time comes, and where he may watch the sleepy daylight glow in the gray undersides of Hans’s scowl. “There were at least two other blue-blooded brats there among them; I could pick them out by sight. And you suggest what—a strongly-worded letter?”

Sir Hanush glowers right back, sitting there in front of the silver pitcher with his great mass of muscle and fat and gnarled black fur, grandiose in Venetian velvet like some storybook’s king. The pleasantness of helloing at Henry dissolves the second that coal-dark stare fixes back upon his nephew. His lion’s growl overtakes the hall without trying. “Don’t put words in my mouth, Capon. And you had better get used to writing brats and barons with more courtesy than they’re due.”

“Because that worked so well last time.”

“My lord, I think what Sir Hanush proposes is—”

“I _know_ what he’s proposing, Bernard. And I know you don’t like it, either. Wolflin’s as much a robber as he is a baron; and you’re protesting that maybe Peter and his ilk somehow didn’t understand this? What—did they miss the whole dress of skin Milota was dragging behind him?”

“I’m protesting nothing of the sort. I am warning you, little bird, that the conflict you just resolved isn’t half as resolved as you think it is. It will either go off to bed with its belly full, or it will come back in a year to knock down your door and raid your larder in the middle of the night. You get to decide which. You can rein in your neighbors gently,” Hanush purports, stroking two beringed fingers around his goatee as if he’s merely an advisor—as if it’s Hans’s decision—as if he isn’t the lawful steward of everything Jan Ješek’s left his least-favorite only son. “Or you can punch each other in the dirt like a bunch of feral hogs until one of them eventually flays you and sends _you_ limping across the border for help.”

“I have a wall. Besides, Bernard would never let that happen.”

“Of course not, sir. But…”

“But-nothing! You’re the finest warrior in the province and this is its most defensible city.”

“That may be true”—although the captain does not sound so confident it is—“but I’m not as young as I used to be, and…”

“You can’t seriously think a little dance of fellowship is going to erase the fact I _saw_ those wastrels scooting their sorry sagging arses around my woods? Uncle—”

Hanush silences them with an obsidian look and a snarl that sounds, to Henry, like faraway thunder. “That’s enough, Capon. We’ll discuss Olomouc again later, once you’ve had a chance to soak your head and cool those heels of yours. Now—despite everything, commendations are in order.”

Hans sulks in his place, but Bernard takes the cue to rise, and so the young lord does, too. They await praise in their breasts of steel. And even though he’s wearing a nobleman’s shirt—and even though his hose are clean and Hans bought him these boots special—Henry lingers there in a shadow and feels very underdressed. He feels too small, somehow, to be here.

Hanush, if he thinks so, says nothing of it. He congratulates his nephew for being rid of the robber baron. He applauds Captain Bernard for keeping the governor safe. He thanks Henry for his small part in the effort to protect this fiefdom from brigands of all stripes. He makes a few statements about the order of kingly law, like a good lord, and like a good lord at the end of a long day, he sends them all to bed.

Except—

Henry, Hanush says.

Henry looks up at the sound of his name.

One more thing, Hanush says. He says stay a moment, would you.

There is no choice, of course. And so Hans quite frankly abandons him there, barely bowing. And though the room is melting into the last smolder of daylight, Henry listens to the jangle of his spurs all the way outside—until they canter down the wooden stairwell, until they skip the third step to the bottom, until they hit cobbles and until he can’t listen anymore.

Captain Bernard departs, too. Henry feels even smaller in the emptiness they leave behind.

Hanush waits until the door shuts behind them. He sits there in his place, heading the grand oak table, his beard and body bleeding into the sure creep of shadow. He’s not a cruel man, Sir Hanush. Nor a cruel lord. But Henry sees his blockish knuckles rest against the heavy wood and the Leipa signet upon them, black metal set with one blistering ruby, and he feels afraid in a filial way his own father never asked him to be.

One of those hands lifts and then drops, punctuating the silence with a dull, terse _whack_. It’s not unfriendly, but all the same, it skitters Henry’s ribs around his heart.

“Pour me another drink, lad,” Hanush says, and he does.

The pitcher is silver and half-empty from dinnertime. It’s the sweet pear wine Hans hates, frothy and yellow. _Like bitch piss_ , hisses the young lord, who prefers his poison blood-bitter and red. But in High Castle Rattay in evening, it looks to him like malted sunlight. Henry feels very thirsty all of a sudden. He swallows the taste of salt, picks it up carefully, and refills Sir Hanush’s waiting cup.

And, as he’s pouring, filling silver with wine—

“The both of you are a little old for this,” Hanush says, “aren’t you?”

He can’t remember any words. He forgets where he is and what is he meant to be doing and overpours.

“Christ, Henry!” A noble paw leaps out to cover the cup, saving him from spilling. Henry blinks down at the Leipa family stone, crimson as a cock's eye on its band, and rights the pitcher just in time. “Watch what you’re doing.”

Hanush’s snarl drags him back. But the darkness seems colder now, and Henry’s neck goosepimples, and his thirst evaporates. He cannot remember if he apologizes, but he sets the wine quietly upon its platter, feeling bloodless, made of milk.

“Go on and pour one for yourself, if you’d like,” Hanush ruffs. He’s a kindly old bear in small ways. His scowl slants deep, but its sharp edge softens, marginally, at the scent of fear. “Just don’t stare at me. You’ve got no right to look like I’ve sprung a trap on you. It’s not as if,” he harrumphs, and uncovers his too-full cup, “you’ve made it a secret.”

Henry serves a goblet for himself, but only because Sir Hanush told him to, and because he is desperate-as-death for something to do. He does not sit down. No one invites him to. He does not touch his drink.

Hanush’s hand dwarfs the little cup. He won’t look at some common blacksmith while he drinks. A swallow moves audibly down his throat, and it’s impossible to understand that entire stately face at once—his brow furrows like a canyon wall and his mouth disappears below the tangled woodlot of his moustache. Henry cannot tell if he is furious. Sir Hanush’s blood is so hot and so full of spleen that it is sometimes difficult to stand in his presence and know when to smile and when to shrink away.

“I’ll get to the point. Henry, you’re a good soldier. A passable one, at least. You’re loyal and—well—you’re loyal. But you’re a rotten page,” Hanush says, and something precious at the back of Henry’s brain feels as though it starts to drip, pearl by pearl, down the ladder of his spine. His lordly eye is fixed on the boar’s head over the ashen fireplace. The animal is frozen in a hideous grimace. Henry does not know if it is something Hans has killed or if it’s Lord Ješek’s—he never thought to ask—and he is terrified, suddenly, by how much of Hans’s life he was not here for. “Surely you realize I can’t let any of this stand.”

Henry has nothing to say. He wishes he could imagine something, but he can’t. His fingers feel like icicles dangling from an apple branch. Hanush takes another stiff swig of his golden berry wine.

“It’s just not done,” he says. The dark hairs on his thumbs stand out strangely; he’s holding the cup tightly enough to warm the silver, and it looks like a fist, even though it isn’t. “You’re a fine boy but you’ve no business cozying up to nobility, let alone a legitimate lord. What the fuck are you thinking!”—and for a moment, Hanush struggles obviously to regain his composure, to douse his rank look and sand the gravel from his bark. “Strutting about the market like a noblewoman’s tomcat. Clacking around with gold on your heels. Do you think I don’t recognize that gaudy fucking shirt?” Hanush’s dark eyes flicker upon him, finally, skewering the poor blacksmith to the spot. “Where’s your God-damned sense of shame?”

The gaudy fucking shirt with its scarlet stitches and copper buttons burns the bones of Henry’s wrists. He itches to tear it off before it scalds him, but there are spearheads in both his arms and a salamander in his throat. Hanush crossly hoists Henry’s untouched goblet to his own lips.

“It’s not done, I tell you,” he says, and gulps. He drains both drinks. The temper washes down, too, crumbling away from his throat like eroded rock. Hanush does not want to yell, perhaps. But perhaps he cannot help it. Perhaps he is not all that different from any other pa.

“Fill my cup,” he orders, nostrils flared. Henry does. His hands shake noticeably now, and his sunken sockets may as well be powdered up with chalk. Hanush downs the wine quickly, and this time, refills it for himself.

“You’ve had your fun,” he says. “But enough is enough.”

“I don’t want a report like that from Captain Bernard ever again—understand?” he says.

“Writing letters back and forth like sodding monks,” he says. “Can you even read, for fuck’s sake?”

He sets the empty cup down too hard. Droplets take wing and scatter upon the table. Hanush has lost his skirmish against himself; his anger has simmered over the bulwark of his calm; Henry can’t feel the dead tongue in his mouth anymore. He knows only that he is not smart or fast or loyal or brave enough to say anything that might change his future. No matter how much he learns or how much he is given, he is always standing lock-kneed under the linden tree, watching everything he cares about eaten by red fire.

“Better yet: You’ll stay out of Pirkstein entirely,” he says.

Henry does not say anything. He is a brown leaf curled up on the tip of a twig.

“I can’t do that,” he murmurs, not meaning to, but the weak breath leaves his lungs in such a way.

“I won’t let him punish you,” Hanush promises. “Don’t fret about that. I’ll toss him in the Danube if he tries.”

“No, sir. It’s”—he dislodges a word—“cruel.”

Hanush levels him with a frank look over the remains of his evening wine.

“Can’t you see,” he says, “that the longer you let this go on, the worse it’s going to be?”

There’s a sound of warhorses bickering in the courtyard. Henry feels as though a skinning knife is sticking out of his kidney, freeing all the poison into his blood.

“I hate to put you in an awkward position, Henry, but you know as well as I do that Birdie won’t listen to reason. So it’s you who has to be reasonable, you understand? You’ll do it for his sake, if nothing else,” he says, tipping the pitcher to fruitlessly check for more wine.

If you have a knife in your belly, you’re not supposed to yank it out. Ma told him that. You have to leave it in, no matter how awful it hurts.

“Today it was a petty baron,” he says. “Tomorrow it might be another lord. Or a vicar. Or a mob. The Estates are separate for a reason,” he says, leaning his burly voice upon the word _reason_ , as though it might push the seeping blade the rest of the way through his belly until it drops out the other side. “That reason is to make it clear to everyone how the world is meant to work according to the laws of Men and God. Flouting reason will only lead to disaster. And Hans has flouted enough on his own to justify a dozen disasters,” he says. “He doesn’t need your help finding his way to a forced abdication.”

The horses have quieted outside. Henry stands still in the lord’s hall and lets his gut bleed.

Hanush regards him frankly over dark wood and silver. He cannot see the blood. “I’d rather we agreed than you make me tell you to stay away from my nephew.”

Henry does not care for rhyme or reason. In his mind’s eye, he grabs the handle and draws a deep breath and pulls the knife out, letting his insides run as they will.

As you say, sir, he says.

“Don’t go around cursing me over it, either. I could just as well have shipped you off to Uzhitz for a year.”

As you say, sir, he says.

“And don’t loom there looking like I put a bolt in your left egg. I’m paying you a fine wage to wear a club and drag your arse about this town—more than you’re worth, I’d wager. He’s still your lord and governor, and you’ve still duties in this fiefdom. Just do a better job of keeping to your own lot.”

As you say, sir, he says.

He says but—

“But-what, angels preserve me?” Hanush dares him stormily, bear fists clenching on either side of his forgotten cup.

But I can’t lie to him, Henry says.

“Christ, lad, then be scarce! Do you want me to send you away?”

No, sir, Henry says. I want to stay in the garrison, Henry says. I don’t want to be sent off, sir, Henry says.

Obedience appeases Sir Hanush. He unfolds his hands and relieves Henry of his rumbling look. “Good. Then you’ll both get what’s best for you and I won’t have to get a fucking earful over it.”

Henry feels like a rabbit stretched apart. His carcass is just tendon and skin. He isn’t sure how much blood he had left to lose.

“Well,” Hanush snaps, separating the Way Things Were from the Way Things Will Be with one final pound of his fist. “Don’t stand there gawping at me.”

Henry says yes, sir. Henry says thank you, sir. Henry bows to his better, rounds the long table, and steps out the door.

It is nighttime, finally, in the city of Rattay.

The air is cool and the early dusk paints the shop walls lavender. Henry leads Pebbles back across the bailey bridge as the first of the fireflies wink lazily at him, claiming their space from the twilight stars. Nightingale waves goodnight as he passes, and his whistlesong echoes in the bedtime quiet with the thumping of hooves.

At the end of the road: Pirkstein.

Henry knows where Hans will be. He knows just which window is his, and just what he wants. He’ll be in his room with the fire popping and the green glass cracked to let in a cool breeze; he’ll be soaking in a bath with his elbows on the edge and his stripped armor in a pile; he’ll be almost through his second pint and waiting to feel drunk enough to close his eyes. He’ll be waiting for Henry, too. He wants to share his wine and hot water and the rest of his night. He wants to laugh off his embarrassment and say mean things about the people they don’t like. He wants to rub Henry’s ears until he’s too floppy and stupid to argue over who gets to be stallion, which isn’t fair at all because he was last time, and have him over the side until the bath’s too old to sit in anymore. He wants to push it out of the way and toss a pelt over the damp floor so they can sit right up close to the fire. He wants to dry off under his enormous blanket together and carp about Hanush and gnaw on deer jerky until Henry’s too sleepy to talk. Then, finally, he wants to climb into bed with wet hair and sleep with their knees hooked together and their nose breath whistling at each other’s faces until morning—until the sun stirs Hans from his short slumber—until Henry twitches free of his red dream and has to go.

Even so, Hans will want Henry to stay.

Henry does not go to him. He supposes they will not do any of that again.

This night, he returns to his lodge. And—not in redness, but in darkness—he packs up the few things he owns.

Even so.

He takes off his fine red shirt and folds it as nicely as he can. He leaves it on the bed. He fumbles around for something-anything to write on—but his fingers feel cold enough to break off, one-by-one, and his throat has sealed up, and his legs are numb, and his stomach seems full of thin blood and hobnails—and all he can find is his old letter from Sir Radzig. He tears, as carefully as handling a flower, the last line out.

_I really am sorry for it all._

He lays it on the young lord’s silks.

He does not sleep at Pirkstein. This night, he rides back to the inn house on the grass hill, long after the fishes have been eaten and the fires have been quenched. He pays for another little room with the wages Hanush gives him. He carries his trunk and his parcel to another little corner. He sits down on another little bed.

And because he does not sleep, he does not dream at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **FUN FACT** : There’s no mention of this as it pertains to KCD’s fictionalized Radzig, who is depicted as the well-established and rightful (if heirless) liege of Skalitz. Historical Radzig, however, was no noble inheritor—he was a lowly-titled robber baron and tax collector, older than his video game counterpart, newly elevated to stewardship of Skalitz by the king’s direct intervention only a scant few years before Sigismund sacked it… and already married with several legitimate children. Which means—had WH not taken some modest narrative liberties with their fictionalization of the real historical timeline—Henry probably shouldn’t exist! (But we’re all glad he does.)
> 
>  **FUN FACT 2** : For all the realism of KCD, it’s downright shocking what Hans and Henry are allowed to get away with. That’s to say little of the homoromanticism and everything about the class difference. What we do in the woods or in the company of bathmaids is one thing, but the relative ease with which their companionship is publicly accepted by—well, everyone—is arguably one of the most fictionalized elements of medieval social history in KCD. Henry, you common blacksmith bastard, you just can’t whap your lord upside the head and call him a buffoon _in front of people_! You can’t just cavalierly first-name him! You cannot make saucy comments about the heat of His Lordship’s armor! MASTER BLACKSMITH.
> 
>  **One last note** : To my knowledge, there is no canonical relation between the poisonous Black Peter of the _Amorous Adventures_ DLC and the Sir Peter whom Hans briefly mentions in his drunken “pigs and prelates” story. Made up.


End file.
